London Local Authorities and Transport for London Bill [Lords]

Read the Third time, and passed, without amendment.

Transas Group Bill

Considered; to be read the Third time.

Oral Answers to Questions

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The Secretary of State was asked—

St. Helena

Bob Russell: If he will visit the island of St. Helena to discuss the (a) economy and (b) population level.

Gareth Thomas: I shall begin, if I may, by taking this opportunity to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development on his well deserved elevation.
	I have no immediate plans to visit St. Helena. Since June of this year, however, I have met twice with representatives of the island's Executive and Legislative Councils. I hope to have discussions with other island councillors during the Overseas Territories' Consultative Council meetings in December. St. Helena's economy and its population level are matters of concern, and featured strongly in my discussions with councillors.

Bob Russell: I thank the Minister for that answer and I join him in congratulating the Secretary of State on his elevation to the Cabinet. He is respected on both sides of the Chamber and is a Minister who can be trusted—perhaps a rare commodity in this Government. Will the Minister think again about visiting St. Helena? No Minister of any Government has ever visited the island, which is a cause for great regret. The economy of the island is falling and the population has decreased by about a quarter in 18 months. Action is needed.

Gareth Thomas: I recognise the hon. Gentleman's long-standing interest in the economy and population levels of St. Helena. As he will know, one of the proposals that we are considering to try to tackle some of those issues is air access. As he will know from the written answer that I issued, we have made progress. We have had four expressions of interest in developing air access and in wider economic regeneration initiatives. I would be happy to arrange a further briefing for him on that issue.

John Smith: Should my hon. Friend decide to visit the island, he would discover great concern about future development because of the education of its children. Does he think that it is right and proper that the children of citizens of British overseas territories have to pay the foreign rate of student fees for higher education, but the children of French overseas territories who attend British universities pay the domestic rate? Can he look into that?

Gareth Thomas: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question and I know that he, too, has had a long-standing interest in the affairs of St. Helena. That particular issue has not featured strongly in the discussions that I have had so far with the island councillors. However, following his request, I will look into the issue further and write to him.

Robert Key: When the Minister visits St. Helena as I hope he will, will he consider carefully the health care system? A review of the system was carried out a few years ago by the Department for International Development, but is he aware of any improvements to health care on the island?

Gareth Thomas: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. Some improvements have been made to elderly care for the people of St. Helena. I do not have the exact details of those improvements, so I will drop him a note to clarify the issue.

India

Andrew Dismore: If he will make a statement on British development programmes in India.

Gareth Thomas: In 2002–03, DFID provided £161 million of bilateral development assistance to support Government efforts to deliver pro-poor policies and services in India. We work closely with four state Governments committed to poverty reduction to help accelerate fiscal and public sector reform; increase access to basic health, education, and urban services; and empower the marginalised. We also support the Union Government and civil society in those areas nationwide.

Andrew Dismore: I am sure that I do not need to remind my hon. Friend that one third of the world's poor live in India, where 400 million people try to survive on less than $1 a day. With the incidence of HIV likely to rise to 8 per cent. over the next 10 years, and the prevalence of long-standing diseases such as polio, will my hon. Friend say what the Government are doing to try to support the Indian Government and individual Indian states in that respect? Will he make particular reference to Gujarat, where so many of my constituents have their roots?

Gareth Thomas: I recognise the importance of Gujarat to my hon. Friend's constituents. Many of my constituents share an interest in, and affinity with, that state, and India more generally. He is right to highlight the rise in HIV/AIDS in India, where some 4.5 million people are, sadly, already infected. The British Government have provided just over £130 million to the Government of India, through their national AIDS control organisation, to help tackle HIV/AIDS. Gujarat is one of the states in which we are working.

Tony Baldry: I understand that in 2003-04 the Department will give £233 million to India by way of bilateral development aid. That reflects what the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) rightly said was the great poverty in India. However, the Foreign Secretary is at the same time allowing India to spend £1 billion on purchasing 60 Hawk jets. In effect, therefore, every penny spent by the Government on development aid to India in the lifetime of this Parliament is effectively subsidising and enabling the Indian Government in the purchase of war planes. Am I alone in thinking that that is a somewhat bizarre arrangement?

Gareth Thomas: First, I must correct the hon. Gentleman's figures on this year's likely spend. We estimate that it will be in the order of £200 million. He may know that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has committed the Government to increasing our spend in India to some £300 million. The hon. Gentleman also referred to Hawk trainer jets, which are for training purposes, and not for operational and offensive purposes. The Government of India's defence expenditure is about on a par with what one would expect for an economy of that size. The initiative to which he refers will not have an impact on development programmes in India.

Piara S Khabra: Does my hon. Friend the Minister agree that trade and development go together? Will not the absence of any agreement at Cancun affect development work in India? What progress is being made to initiate further negotiations with the parties involved?

Gareth Thomas: My hon. Friend is right about the importance of making progress on trade negotiations. We were disappointed by the lack of further progress at Cancun. We welcome the statement by India's Commerce Minister, Arun Jaitley, that he is keen to get back to negotiations. My hon. Friend will have noted today that the World Trade Organisation has begun to look at how we might make that happen.

Andrew Robathan: I have just returned from a visit to India, as a guest of the Indian Government. Does the Minister share my concern that the World Bank has just written to the chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh—one of DFID's four chosen states—because of World Bank concerns about the failure to combat corruption? Does he share my surprise that for the past year the European Commission has occupied the entire fifth floor of the most expensive hotel in New Delhi and used it for offices? Does he think that that is a good way to spend the money of EU and UK taxpayers?

Gareth Thomas: I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has visited India. I, too, have just returned from India, where I discussed with the EU Commission our programmes, and the programmes that it has in hand. It is worth noting that the EU programme in India has been audited and given a good bill of health. We have a very constructive dialogue with the EU Commission in respect of its work in India. The hon. Gentleman's criticisms of the EU reflect his party's ongoing hostility to Europe more than real concerns about what the EU is doing in India.

Afghanistan

Graham Allen: What assistance his Department has given to re-establish democracy in Afghanistan.

Hilary Benn: The Department financially supported both the traditional Loya Jirga in June 2002, which elected President Karzai, and the public consultation on the new constitution. We are helping to fund the current electoral registration process. We have also translated into Pashto and Dari the report that we commissioned on the political process in Afghanistan, and which has been distributed through the independent Human Rights Commission.

Graham Allen: First, may I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his very well deserved promotion? He is proof that merit need not stand in the way of a ministerial career. Does he agree that it is very important, in Afghanistan, that we are seen to be making a democratic infrastructure work? That is especially important, given the possibility that it may be extended into Iraq. We have been involved in Afghanistan for a longer period, and people need to see progress in respect of democracy there if they are to have faith that we can make progress in Iraq. Will he continue to work with President Karzai to ensure that the infrastructure is built in Afghanistan?

Hilary Benn: I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words, which give me the opportunity to express my appreciation to my noble Friend Baroness Amos for the work she did as Secretary of State and to wish her well in her new responsibilities. My hon. Friend is right when he says that we need to stick with the process of building a democracy in Afghanistan. That is why, as a Department, we are giving practical support to the constitutional process and to electoral registration, as I have said. The most important thing is that the people of Afghanistan now have the opportunity for that process to take place because of the action that was taken to remove the Taliban. We need to stick with them as they determine their own future.

Peter Tapsell: As I may be one of the relatively few Members of this House to have debated with the Secretary of State's grandfather as well as his father, may I too congratulate him on maintaining his family's ministerial and aristocratic role in the Labour movement? On establishing democracy in Afghanistan, may I urge him to remind his colleagues that other countries often have cultures and traditions that are different from our own and that to try to impose foreign forms of government on them is often counter-productive and futile?

Hilary Benn: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. I hope that he will find dealing with me a similarly pleasurable experience. The constitutional Loya Jirga process that has been adopted in Afghanistan is taking place precisely because we recognise his point about the need to respect particular traditions and ways of doing things. The Loya Jirga needs to be given the time to draw up the new constitution. Then, the process can take place—hopefully, with elections next year. We need to acknowledge the cultural tradition of countries while upholding the principles of democracy that all hon. Members hold dear.

Joan Ruddock: May I also congratulate my right hon. Friend on his appointment and ask him to join me in congratulating President Karzai, who has said that, of the 50 delegates that he will appoint to the Loya Jirga, 25 will be women? My right hon. Friend will know that that is what Afghan women, within their traditions, want—they want to participate. Will he discuss with the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM, ways in which special help can be given to women to ensure their safe and thorough participation in the Loya Jirga and to prevent the intimidation that happened last time?

Hilary Benn: I am happy to tell my hon. Friend that I will be delighted to discuss that issue with UNIFEM. Indeed, I had a conversation on the subject when I was in New York recently. I very much welcome what President Karzai said about the steps that he will take in appointing women to the Loya Jirga. Of course, under the arrangements that have been put in place, 19 per cent. of the delegates to that body will have to be women. It is also worth reflecting on the fact that one third of teachers working in the schools of Afghanistan are now women and 30 per cent. of the pupils are girls—a situation that did not obtain when the Taliban were in control of that country.

Caroline Spelman: I, too, congratulate the Secretary of State on his well deserved promotion. It is important, after an absence of five months, to have the Secretary of State in this House again. I am sure that the whole House will agree that giving Afghan women the vote is vital for the future of Afghanistan. Given the problems of electoral registration of women and the likelihood that those in traditional communities may simply vote as their husbands do, will the right hon. Gentleman tell the House what measures have been taken to inform and encourage women to participate on an individual and equal basis in next year's elections?

Hilary Benn: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her kind words. She raises an important point about the process of change that is taking place in Afghanistan. First, as she says, we have to get the electoral registration process to work. It will begin in the cities and then move on to the rural areas, where the job will be more difficult—we need to acknowledge that.
	Secondly, we are supporting activities of which I am sure that the hon. Lady will be aware, trying to encourage the kind of discussion to which she has just drawn the attention of the House. Thirdly, in the long term, the return of girls to school and the participation of women in civil society is the best contribution that we can make to enabling women to have the place in Afghan society that she and I would like to see.

Bill Tynan: I shall pass on the congratulations as I think enough has been done. My right hon. Friend will be aware of the United Nations Security Council resolution to extend the role of peacemakers in Afghanistan. At present, 16 of the 32 provinces are no-go areas for non-governmental organisations. Will my right hon. Friend indicate what can be done by his Department to extend the role of NGOs in Afghanistan?

Hilary Benn: My hon. Friend draws attention to the key issue in Afghanistan, which is security. The new UN resolution on ISAF—the international security assistance force—which has just been passed, will help. Four of the provincial reconstruction teams, which are a civil-military alliance, have already been deployed, including the UK team in Mazar. We hope that four more teams will be deployed before the end of the year. Training of the Afghan national army is being stepped up, as is training of the police. Those are all steps that we have to take to provide the security in which all the other things that we want to see in Afghanistan can happen.

Middle East

Teddy Taylor: Which nations in the Middle East receive grants and assistance from the Department.

Hilary Benn: DFID currently provides bilateral assistance to Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territory, Syria and Yemen. We also provide assistance for Afghan refugees in Iran. Our future plans are set out in our regional assistance plan for the middle east and north Africa, published last month. In addition, the EC funds large programmes in several countries in the middle east; 19 per cent. of EC programme funding in the region is attributed to DFID's budget.

Teddy Taylor: I offer my congratulations to the right hon. Gentleman. Has he yet had time to establish whether there are procedures in his Department to make sure that the money given to those countries is properly spent and that there is no question of any money going to organisations that support terrorism in any way?

Hilary Benn: I can assure the hon. Gentleman that processes and procedures are in place precisely to protect against the concern that he raised. Concerns have been expressed as regards EC funding. Those have been looked into and they have not been substantiated. In particular relation to the Palestinian Authority, under Finance Minister Fayyad big progress has been made in bringing the finances into shape and improving accountability, so much so that the United States Administration recently offered direct financial support to the Palestinian Authority. That is recognition of the progress that has been made. [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. The House is far too noisy. It is unfair to those who are interested in these items of business.

Gerald Kaufman: Following his much appreciated visit to the Palestinian territories earlier this year, is my right hon. Friend aware that in Bethlehem last week the deputy mayor demonstrated to me how the Israeli plan to build a wall through Bethlehem will wreck that city's economy, destroying tourism by preventing access to holy shrines and obstructing access to the Church of the Nativity and preventing access by owners to thousands of acres of agricultural land? What action can my right hon. Friend take even now to try to prevent the building of that hideous wall?

Hilary Benn: My right hon. Friend draws attention to a serious problem for the Palestinians. When I was there at the end of July I visited Qalqilya where the wall completely encircles a town, leaving an 8 m gap where it joins at the other end, with all the consequences to which my right hon. Friend has drawn attention. The Government have made our views extremely clear—my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary did so yesterday during Foreign Office questions—about the illegality of building the wall on Palestinian land, but it is a symptom of the problem, which is the lack of security, and that is why the peace process must be put back on track. We shall only deal with all the consequences to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) has just referred when we get peace in the middle east.

Iraq

Vincent Cable: What consultations took place with the British Government on the foreign investment and tax policies introduced in Iraq by the interim authorities.

Hilary Benn: The order on foreign investment and the tax policies in the 2004 draft budget were approved by the governing council. The British Government have been kept informed about the coalition provisional authority's proposals for economic reform, and we have secondees in the CPA, assisting in Iraq's development. We share the CPA's aim of attracting investment into Iraq and the creation of a diversified tax base.

Vincent Cable: May I add congratulations from the Liberal Democrat Benches?
	Since the first major decision was to spend £550 million of British taxpayers' money in Iraq, what steps has the right hon. Gentleman taken to assure himself that the economic policy framework is sound and democratically based? In particular, how does he respond to the criticism of the Nobel laureate, Joe Stiglitz, and others that Iraq is being used as a laboratory experiment for the ideas of the extreme right wing of the American Republican party?

Hilary Benn: That is not a view that I would share. I think that what the House is concerned about is how we can support Iraq in the process of getting the country back on its feet. The most important answer to the hon. Gentleman's question is that the governing council took the decision about the steps on tax policy and investment. Iraq desperately needs investment because, if we can combine that with political progress and security and as it is a country with talent, resource, expertise, and a well-educated population, it should have a prosperous future if we stick with the course that we are currently charting.

Peter Mandelson: May I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend on his promotion? I think that he will do his job very well, and I wish him every success.
	May I also commend the Government for their decision to contribute financially to the rebuilding of Iraq? Although there is obviously a mountain to climb, does my right hon. Friend agree that, since the removal of Saddam Hussein's vicious and destructive regime, security has been restored to the overwhelming bulk of that country, the police and the army are being rebuilt, the economy is stable, food and water are getting to the Iraqi people and the governing council is a vital step to restoring sovereign government in that country? Is not all that something that we in Britain can take considerable pride in helping to bring about?

Hilary Benn: I agree with my right hon. Friend's description of what is happening in Iraq at the moment—a description that one would not always get from just reading the newspapers and watching the television. It is important that people have a balanced picture of the progress that is being made, while recognising the continuing security concerns. He is absolutely right: if Saddam were still there, we would not be having any of this conversation about the possibility of a new future for the people of Iraq.

Tom Brake: I too congratulate the Secretary of State on his new position. I know that he will fight hard on behalf of his Department.
	Did the consultations include an assessment of whether the policies to be introduced by the Iraqi governing council are, in fact, in breach of the advice given by the Attorney-General to Her Majesty's Government? Does the Secretary of State favour the economic shock therapy that will be introduced in Iraq? Does he not in fact believe that that will only fuel resentment against foreign companies and foreign countries, particularly the US and the UK?

Hilary Benn: I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his first appearance as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on international development.
	The most important answer to the hon. Gentleman's question is that this was a decision of the governing council. The House needs to trust the Iraqis, who now have responsibility for taking forward that country in the decisions that they take and in the hard process of moving from the nightmare that they have experienced for the past 25 years to the prosperous future that we all want for it.

Caroline Spelman: In the Department's most recent Iraq update, 70 per cent. of Government investment in reconstruction has been allocated through the UN and yesterday's written statement reveals a further blank cheque. The Department has flatly refused to fund individual projects, such as the rebuilding of the spinal injuries unit in Baghdad. Does the Secretary of State accept that, because of that loss of control over how the money is spent, good projects such as that one just do not get a look in?

Hilary Benn: The Government have not given a blank cheque. We are funding practical progress and real investment, as the hon. Lady will know, including in southern Iraq, where 17 projects have been approved to improve water and sanitation under the scheme that started just over a month ago. In relation to the particular hospital, in which I know that she takes a real interest, the discussion needs to take place with the Minister of Health, who is now in post, about Iraqi priorities for the future of the health service in that country. We need to back Iraqi judgment.

PRIME MINISTER

The Prime Minister was asked—

Engagements

Andrew Robathan: If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 15 October.

Tony Blair: Before listing my engagements, I would like to express our condolences on behalf of the Government and both Houses to the family of Gareth Williams, Lord Williams of Mostyn, who died suddenly on 20 September. He was an extraordinary man with excellent judgment and a fine intellect who earned the respect not only of his Cabinet and Government colleagues but of members of all political parties. He was a kind and generous man who sparked huge affection in all who knew him, and he will be deeply missed.
	This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I will have further such meetings later today.

Andrew Robathan: Does the Prime Minister remember his commitment of September 1999 that by September 2001 anyone will be able to find an NHS dentist? Last month, September 2003, I received a document on dentistry from the Leicestershire strategic health authority, which said that in Leicestershire there are currently problems—across the county, and around Lutterworth in south Leicestershire because there are no practices accepting new NHS patients. When will the Prime Minister fulfil his promise to my constituents and the people of Leicestershire on dentistry?

Tony Blair: I will certainly look into the situation in Leicestershire. We have made huge attempts to make sure that people can get access to NHS dentistry. I remind the hon. Gentleman that it was under the Government whom he supported that NHS dentistry was done more damage than at any time since the NHS started. I would also point out that whereas we are now increasing resources going into the NHS, his policy is to take them out.

Ann McKechin: As the Prime Minister will be aware, low pay still remains a problem for thousands of workers in this country, particularly in cities such as Glasgow where they form the largest income group. Does he agree that the minimum wage is one of the best ways to tackle that problem, and will he consider repeating next year this year's excellent decision to raise the minimum wage above the rate of inflation?

Tony Blair: There are now 1.3 million workers in Britain who have benefited thanks to the minimum wage. The lowest paid have had their incomes increased by £1,500 a year as a result of the minimum wage. We are proud that this party introduced the minimum wage. We remember being told by some that introducing a minimum wage would cost 1 million jobs. In fact, we have managed to introduce the minimum wage and gain 1 million jobs.

Iain Duncan Smith: May I join the Prime Minister in sending our condolences from this side of the House to Lord Williams' family? As he said, Lord Williams was highly respected by those in all political parties.
	The Minister for Local Government says that council tax bills have reached "the limit of acceptability". Does the Prime Minister therefore agree that it would be unacceptable for them to rise further?

Tony Blair: We have said that we will use the capping powers if necessary in respect of unacceptable council tax rises. I would point out, however, that we have funded a 25 per cent. real-terms increase in the money going to local government since 1997. In the end, of course, it is for councils to decide their level of council tax.

Iain Duncan Smith: The Prime Minister, as ever, seeks to blame councils for those rises, but he knows that it is his Chancellor's hike in national insurance, the pensions tax and the huge salary increases that he has put down on councils that are to blame. He has said that the limit of acceptability has been reached, so why does the Red Book say that the Chancellor is banking on council tax increases of 13.5 per cent. over the next two years?

Tony Blair: We have made it clear that we are not prepared to see unacceptable rises in council tax. We have said that we will use the capping powers if necessary. However, I repeat that it is necessary for central Government to fund local government generously. We are funding it generously and, in the end, it is for councils to decide their own level of tax.

Iain Duncan Smith: The average family is now paying more than £1,000 in council tax and the Chancellor says that, on top of all that, they must pay £150 more over the next two years. This comes on top of council tax increases of 70 per cent. since this Government came to power. All this is from a Prime Minister who said he had no plans to raise taxes at all. Has not the council tax under this Government become the biggest stealth tax of all?

Tony Blair: No. As I said in answer to an earlier question, I believe that the responsibility of the Government is to fund local councils generously. A 25 per cent. real-terms increase since we came to power is very generous. It compares with the 7 per cent. real-terms cut in the few years before we came to power.
	The right hon. Gentleman talks about national insurance and, yes, it is correct that national insurance has been an additional cost, but we make no apology for having raised national insurance to fund the national health service better. If he is saying that he would remove that national insurance increase, perhaps he will say so.

Gisela Stuart: Given the Prime Minister's clear commitment and preference for an appointed rather than an elected second Chamber, will he share with the House his views on what kinds of qualities he will be looking for in those who he wishes to see appointed?

Tony Blair: I have given my view. So far as Labour Members are concerned, my preference, which is probably in accordance with the views of most Prime Ministers before me, would be for ones who would actually support the Government.

Charles Kennedy: I wish to associate my right hon. and hon. Friends with the very proper expressions of condolences to the family of the late Lord Williams. Those of us in all parties who worked with him in both Houses held him in great affection and respect. He will be greatly missed.
	Is it the Prime Minister's personal preference to introduce legislation to the House to bring forward a scheme for identity cards?

Tony Blair: As I have said before, I believe that identity cards have a place but two issues have to be resolved, which is why the Government are looking at them. The first is in relation to the logistics of such a card and the second is in relation to the cost. When we look at the levels of benefit fraud and the problems that arise from asylum and immigration, I think that, in principle, yes they are a good idea.

Charles Kennedy: At the end of that answer, the Prime Minister said yes, in principle, he thinks identity cards are a good idea. The Home Secretary publicly said on the record this week that there are divisions within the Cabinet on this matter. Given that there is such disagreement around the Cabinet table, can we therefore assume that, despite the Prime Minister's personal preference, there will not be legislation in the Queen's Speech for identity cards?

Tony Blair: We must wait for the Queen's Speech to see what is in it. In relation to the two issues that I have just described, there are issues of cost and logistics. However, the question is whether those issues can be overcome, and that is precisely what we are looking at now. I remember a similar debate about identity cards under the previous Government, but I happen to believe that in today's world, where we have masses of migration across national frontiers and where there are real problems with fraud, if we can overcome the questions about costs and logistics, yes, in principle, identity cards are the right thing to do.

Nick Palmer: Following the previous question, does the Prime Minister accept that if we claim benefits or any kind of entitlement from the state, it is not unreasonable to show who we are? Is there not overwhelming support for the principle of identity cards, so that we have a society in which people claim what they have the personal right to claim?

Tony Blair: It is for precisely that reason that the issue arises. The question, particularly with the new biometric technology, is whether there is a way in which the costs of introducing such a scheme will be justified by the benefits that we get back as a result. That is precisely why we need to undertake the detailed work, and we are doing that. I would have thought that that was sensible for any Government to do.

Henry Bellingham: Has the Prime Minister had a chance to look at yesterday's report by the centre for education and employment research at Liverpool university, which concluded that this year's education funding crisis has forced schools, including many in Norfolk, to shed 21,000 staff, which has led to larger classes, poorer teaching and a reduced curriculum? With two thirds of all schools in England and Wales being worse off, what has happened to his election promise of "education, education, education"?

Tony Blair: I will tell the hon. Gentleman what has happened to that. Since this Government came to office, we now have 25,000 more teachers and 80,000 more classroom assistants. I shall tell him what he has actually got in Norfolk—almost 400 more teachers, 1,000 more teaching assistants and 1,300 more support staff. I agree that there are schools that have had problems with their funding this year—that is absolutely true—but the answer to that cannot be his policy, which is to impose cuts on state school funding. With the greatest respect, he should ask himself how he managed to go through the Lobby to vote against increases in education spending.

Piara S Khabra: Every week I receive letters from my constituents who are concerned about bullying, neighbour nuisance, vandalism, graffiti, thuggish behaviour, abandoned cars and the dumping of rubbish. That sort of criminality is not acceptable to decent citizens. Will the House join me in congratulating the Prime Minister and his Cabinet on investing millions of pounds in schemes to tackle antisocial behaviour? Will the Prime Minister also assure the House that his Government will monitor the progress of the antisocial behaviour action plan?

Tony Blair: Everyone recognises the huge problem of antisocial behaviour, and the new powers that will come into effect early next year—especially with fixed penalty notice fines—will allow the police and others, such as local authority officials, to deal promptly and summarily with antisocial behaviour. Where the fines have been piloted, they have been immensely successful. From what was being said by many police officers throughout the country yesterday, I think that they now have available the range of powers to tackle antisocial behaviour. It is also important to point out, as I am sure my hon. Friend would like to, that whereas this side of the House supported the Anti-social Behaviour Bill, the Liberal Democrats opposed it.

Iain Duncan Smith: Will the Prime Minister say how much a typical pensioner couple will have to save over their lifetime to avoid a means test?

Tony Blair: I cannot say the exact amount, but I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that about 2 million pensioners have already benefited from the pension credit, which means, in many cases, that they benefit by £8, £10 or even more a week. His proposal, which is to take that money off them, would be disastrous for them and the poorest pensioners in our country.

Iain Duncan Smith: Under the Prime Minister's own figures, 1.4 million of the poorest pensioners now will not get even an extra penny from the Chancellor's scheme. Under the Prime Minister's Government, persistent pensioner poverty has actually risen since 1997. Now, a pensioner couple will have to save £180,000—that is a massive amount—just to escape his means test, and that from the Chancellor who said that he would
	"end the means test for our elderly people".
	Will the Prime Minister now tell us how many more pensioners are on means-tested benefits since 1997?

Tony Blair: Those who are on the pension credit are, I think, absolutely delighted to be on it because it gives a substantial uplift to their income. That goes alongside the winter fuel allowance, free television licences for over-75s and above inflation increases to the basic state pension. Let us be quite clear: this Government have done a huge amount for the poorest pensioners in our community, but every single one of those measures has been opposed by the right hon. Gentleman and his party.

Iain Duncan Smith: There are now 6 million pensioners on the means test—that is 2 million more than when the Prime Minister came to power in 1997. Two million pensioners have to go cap in hand to his Government just to make ends meet. Why will he not take people out of the means test, raise the state pension and give pensioners dignity and independence in retirement?

Tony Blair: This is the Conservative party that now says that it is the great champion of linking the pension to earnings, but they are the people who took away the link between earnings and pensions. As for saying that people go cap in hand, in light of the 2 million pensioners and the many hundreds of thousands to come who are receiving large additional amounts, we make no apology for saying that the poorest should get most. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman can explain how he can afford his policy without taking that money off those pensioners who are on pension credit? Every one of those 2 million pensioners, including those people who are watching us now, knows that his policy is to take that money off them.

Huw Edwards: Will my right hon. Friend join me in commending the work of the Territorial Army, currently employed in the reconstruction of Iraq, and in particular the 175 members of the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers, based in my constituency, who are involved in infrastructure work and force protection? I talked to the commanding officer, Colonel David Caulfield, this morning. He wants to acknowledge the support of employers in allowing their staff to work for the TA. Does my right hon. Friend agree that when the TA leaves Iraq, there will be a great deal of humanitarian and infrastructure work for it to get involved in developing countries throughout the world?

Tony Blair: I concur with my hon. Friend. I pay tribute to the four members of the Territorial Army who lost their lives while on mobilised service in Iraq. Our condolences are with their families, friends and colleagues.
	The work of members of the TA who are from my hon. Friend's constituency and elsewhere has been of enormous assistance. As a result of what the British Army—both Territorials and regulars—is doing in the south of Iraq, it is possible to see real progress on the ground. When people hear the tragic cases of terrorist bombings and attacks, I only wish that they would also realise that massive good is being done by British and American troops. We can be proud of what they are doing.

Nigel Dodds: Does the Prime Minister accept that the two parties from Northern Ireland that were invited to Downing street on Monday cannot deliver stability in the Province? Will he announce that elections, which he has twice postponed in North Ireland, will be allowed to proceed, that there will be no more attempts to save Dave or to appease the IRA, and that the people of Northern Ireland will have their say and choose who will negotiate a better way forward for them, based on an agreement that Unionists as well as nationalists can support?

Tony Blair: We accept that elections should go ahead and we are considering when those should be. However, I have two things to say to the hon. Gentleman. First, I believe that the agreement has delivered tremendous benefits for people in Northern Ireland over the past few years. No one who returns to Northern Ireland now after an absence of, say, seven, eight or 10 years could fail to see the progress that has been made. With the greatest of respect to the hon. Gentleman, that progress is a result of the courage of those leaders, including Unionist leaders, who have been willing to participate in the process.
	Secondly, the hon. Gentleman says that some other agreement is waiting out there to be negotiated. As I said to some of his colleagues when they came to see me, I do not know what that agreement is, but I do not see him or his colleagues negotiating a better agreement. The agreement that we have is the only agreement on offer. To say anything else is deeply to mislead the people in Northern Ireland.

Chris Bryant: Further to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Khabra), does the Prime Minister agree that antisocial behaviour is an issue not just in inner-city areas, but in many rural and semi-rural areas, such as former mining constituencies such as the Rhondda and Sedgefield? My constituents are sick and tired of the antisocial behaviour of a few ruining the lives of the many. They want a police service that is so well resourced that the phone is answered every time and every incident is dealt with robustly. Will the Prime Minister assure my constituents that that is not simply a vain aspiration but his determined intent?

Tony Blair: Overall in my hon. Friend's constituency and the country, crime has fallen in the past few years according to the British crime survey. We have record numbers of police officers and, in addition, community support officers. He is right, however, to draw attention to the fact that we need legislation to go with that. Antisocial behaviour legislation is important, as is the Criminal Justice Bill. I simply say to Opposition Members that the Conservatives in the House of Lords are still opposing central measures of the Criminal Justice Bill dealing with organised crime, previous convictions and other things that the police say are necessary in the fight against crime. I appeal to both sides of this House and the other place to support those measures because they are necessary in the fight against crime.

David Heathcoat-Amory: In his party conference speech, the Prime Minister promised to change asylum laws and end what he called the gravy train of legal assistance, and to stop judicial interference in such matters. How does he square that with the European constitution, under which all those matters will be transferred to the European Union to be decided by majority voting and asylum and immigration rights will be permanently entrenched in the charter of fundamental rights, which will be part of the constitution? That will mean more judicial intervention.
	How can the Prime Minister promise things at home, while simultaneously negotiating the transference of all these matters to another jurisdiction?

Tony Blair: The simple fact is that I am not. It is absolutely clear that the charter of fundamental rights does not enlarge the jurisdiction of the European Court. As for the laws that we propose in this country, under the European Constitution we shall have every right to pass them, and we will do so. I hope that when we do, we shall have the support of the right hon. Gentleman's party as well.
	Despite what is, as usual, being said by the Conservatives—who have returned to their obsession with Europe after a brief interlude during which they appeared to depart from it—the plain fact is that we need this constitution to make a Europe of 25 work well. I make no apology for saying that this country's place lies not where the Conservatives want it, at the margins of Europe, but at the centre of Europe, leading in Europe.

Tony Cunningham: I taught for some 17 years, and have spent a lot of time in schools in my constituency. It is fairly obvious that educational standards are rising. This summer we saw some of the best examination results that we have ever seen. It is also fairly obvious that teachers are working harder than they have ever worked. While I am sure the Prime Minister will join me in paying tribute to their efforts, does he agree that we really need to do something about their workload?

Tony Blair: My hon. Friend is right: overall, standards have risen significantly over the past few years. They have risen substantially in primary schools, and GCSE and A-level results are better.
	My hon. Friend's point about teachers' workload is important. That is why we are negotiating a national agreement to reduce the workload. It is also important to get the right support staff into schools, which is why the introduction of 80,000 additional classroom assistants is so significant.

Gregory Barker: Which policy does the Prime Minister think would find more support with his Back Benchers, the Conservative pledge to link pensions with earnings or his own commitment to introduce tuition fees?

Tony Blair: I will tell the hon. Gentleman what I think about both policies. In respect of tuition fees, I think that the Conservative policy of taking £500 million out of the university budget immediately would be disastrous for universities. [Interruption.] Yes—that is the Conservatives' pledge. They may think it an easy pledge to make; we will see how they explain it to the students who will have to leave universities as a result.
	As for pensions and earnings, I think—as any sensible person does—that the additional money we give to pensions is best targeted at the pensioners who need it most. What the hon. Gentleman will have to explain come the next election is why all the pensioners on pension credit will lose it under the Conservative plan.

Robert Wareing: Will my right hon. Friend give a categorical assurance that should Israel and the United States engage in hostilities against Syria, this country will not be involved?

Tony Blair: We have absolutely no plans to engage in hostilities in respect of Syria. That is what my hon. Friend would expect me to say. Let me also say that it is extremely important, obviously, for Israel to conduct itself with restraint in these very difficult times, but I hope that my hon. Friend understands how hard that is for a country such as Israel, a democracy that faces the carnage of so many of its citizens in these appalling terrorist attacks. It necessarily feels that it must react and do something about that.
	I think that, in the end, the only way forward is to put the middle east peace process back on track according to the road map that has been set out. I hope that those who look at the situation in the middle east realise that although, of course, there is misery and degradation on the Palestinian side—which is why the peace process is so important—there is also terrible innocent suffering on the Israeli side. It is important for us to recognise and remember that because there is too often a tendency for the international community to look only at the faults on one side, and not at those on all sides.

Nigel Evans: Why does the Prime Minister dislike pensioners so much? Let us look at the facts. One of the first acts of his Government was to raid their pension funds. Then he and his Government bullied millions of pensioners into switching their pensions away from post offices to banks, thereby closing hundreds of post offices, four of which have recently closed in my constituency. Now we see pensioners struggling to pay the obscene increases in council tax—up to 70 per cent. since his Government came to power. For the Government to give some money with one hand and claw back more with the other is not a decent policy for our pensioners. When will the Prime Minister start supporting our pensioners and stop kicking them at every turn?

Tony Blair: This Government have introduced larger than average rises in the basic state pension, the winter fuel allowance of £200, free TV licences for the over-75s and the free eye test. We are introducing in the pension credit money for the poorest pensioners, millions of whom will benefit as a result of it. People remember 18 years of a Conservative Government who broke the link between earnings and pensions, and who were associated with all the scandals of private pensions. As this is the Conservatives' latest opportunism, let me remind them what their social security spokesman said just a couple of years ago about re-linking earnings to pensions—that that is uncosted and unaffordable. The Conservatives have a plan in which they do not really believe, and which will mean that pensioners lose hundreds of pounds a year, because the pension credit will help pensioners and the Conservatives will take it off them.

Liz Blackman: Like many Members, I represent a former mining community. Many former miners in my constituency have been compensated for the lung disease and vibration white finger that they contracted as a result of their former occupation. Others await redress. Can my right hon. Friend give me an update on the progress of the compensation scheme towards meeting those outstanding claims?

Tony Blair: I do not have the exact figures, but I understand that hundreds of millions of pounds have been paid out in compensation claims. I know that there are still claims outstanding. As my hon. Friend recognises, part of the problem is that each claim has had to be assessed individually. We have made real efforts to speed up the process. Apparently, £1.6 billion has already been paid out, and I hope very much that we can deal with the remaining claims as swiftly as possible.

Bill Wiggin: Considering that the Government were supposed to replace the special waste regulation for hazardous waste but have not done so, how are we supposed to trust them with radioactive waste? How much do the Government propose to spend on compensating communities that agree to have a radioactive waste management facility?

Tony Blair: Perhaps I can write and give the hon. Gentleman a more detailed reply. With reference to radioactive waste, there are rules, plus an independent objective body that assesses risk. Those rules must be adhered to and the body makes a report on them. Some of the concerns that people have often turn out to be far less well grounded than they think.

John Robertson: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the fact that call centres make simultaneous calls to customers, and when a customer answers, all the other calls continue ringing and cause a nuisance, particularly to the elderly, when they answer the phone and find that there is nobody there? This has been happening ever since the call centres started moving abroad. Will my right hon. Friend look into the situation, and also try to stop call centres relocating abroad?

Tony Blair: I am not sure that I can promise to stop call centres relocating. In the end it is a commercial decision that they must take, but I shall look into the point that my hon. Friend makes about the calls.

Mark Francois: Council tax now represents the single largest outlay for many pensioners across the country, including those among my constituents in Rayleigh. Will the Prime Minister give a commitment to review the new formula spending share arrangements that determine how much money goes from central Government to local government, in order to overturn the iniquitous situation whereby so much money has been taken from councils in the south with the effect of subsidising Labour's friends in the north?

Tony Blair: The hon. Gentleman's last point is simply incorrect. In fact, all councils have received real-terms increases since 1997; that compares with real-terms cuts in the last few years of the last Conservative Government. I have to say to him and his colleagues, who are asking for more money to be spent on virtually everything that they can think of—from schools to local government; even to hazardous waste—that the policy of the Conservative party is to cut public spending. That cut in public spending, which would include local government, would result in less money going to local government and therefore even more money on council tax. Whatever the solutions to the problems that the hon. Gentleman raises, they are not those put forward by his party.

Points of Order

Quentin Davies: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As the House knows, today is the last day on which the Government can call for Assembly elections in Northern Ireland if the elections are to take place by the date that is required by the legislation—15 November. Devolved government in Northern Ireland is an essential part of the Belfast agreement, which the Prime Minister described only a few minutes ago as the only agreement in Northern Ireland.
	The people of Northern Ireland are entitled to the right to democratic, peaceful political expression, and it is very important that that right is restored to them. So far as the momentum of the peace process is concerned, unfortunately, as I predicted at the time, the postponement of the elections in May had no other consequence than to bring to a complete halt the negotiations that had been launched at Hillsborough.
	In those circumstances, Mr. Speaker, the whole of Northern Ireland is waiting to see what the Government are going to do about the situation, given that they have taken it down to the wire in their usual arbitrary fashion. Have you had any indication that the Government are to make a statement today about an intention to hold elections in Northern Ireland by the required date; or that they are to come before the House, as they would otherwise have to, with proposals for new legislation to give them the power—very unfortunately and regrettably, if that is their decision—to postpone the elections for a third time?

Lembit �pik: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will know that Liberal Democrat Members have been concerned that the silence on this matter is causing instability in Northern Ireland. I should like to associate myself with the hon. Gentleman's question and to add one. If the Government refuse to make a statement in the next few days, do you have any power to require a written statement from the Northern Ireland Office in order to provide clarification of the kind that the hon. Gentleman requests?

David Trimble: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not the case that under the existing legislation the Government have the power to call elections; that that power remains effective until 15 November; and that the legislation does not require the election to be held before 15 November?

Peter Robinson: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Given that the Northern Ireland (Elections and Periods of Suspension) Act 2003 has a sunset clause, is it not a discourtesy to this House for the Government not to come to explain to Members why they have not today made a statement calling elections? They are required by statute to come to this House to let us know whether they are going to hold an election in time. Instead of trying to appease someone who has been attempting to run away from the electorate since last May, they should come to this House and explain themselves.

Mr. Speaker: This is not a matter for the Speaker. However, the points have been made and the appropriate Minister will have heard what has been said in the Chamber. I draw the House's attention to the fact that tomorrow we have business questions, during which such matters can be raised if right hon. and hon. Members so wish; and, of course, representations can always be made to the appropriate Minister.

Representation of the People (Consequences of Devolution)

Andrew George: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for a reduction in the number of Members of Parliament; to make provision for referendums on regional assemblies; and for connected purposes.
	I am sure that I would be high on the list of Members whom certain people would like to cull from this honourable establishment, but it would cause me considerable grief even to contemplate anyone leaving it. For reasons that I shall explain, however, I believe that some tough choices need to be made as a consequence of the programme of devolution in this country.
	Why am I proposing that we should significantly reduce the number of MPs in this House? I am not the first person to make the suggestion. I do so, first, because of a dislocation of the public from the political process and a disregard for politicians that is increasing over time; secondly, because there are more MPs in the United Kingdom than in any other European Union country, and certainly more than in any other comparable western democracy, because of the consequences of the process of devolution; and, thirdly, because we can make considerable savings by reducing the number of MPs. I am sure that the public would rather see those resources spent on front-line public services than on maintaining an unfeasible and inappropriate number of MPs in this House. I also believe that there would be operational improvements in the way in which the House operates.
	Although I would have introduced a Bill of this nature in any case, I have to declare an interest, in that I currently face a boundary commission review in my constituency. With a population of 500,000, the five constituencies in Cornwall have an electorate per constituency of 77,000, which the boundary commission has decided is 7,000 over the national electoral quota. It has therefore decided that the number of MPs should be increased from five to six. We welcome the decision, of course, but it means that we face some difficult choices.
	In my constituency, for example, the boundary commission has proposed that I should lose the whole of the Lizard, which is where I was born and brought up, but clandestine proposals have also been made by another political party to gerrymander the constituency's boundaries in another area, which would take out the town of Hayle, in which I live. That is not a choice that I welcome. The issue of under-representation in Cornwall should clearly be addressed, but we should do so in a quite different waynamely, by reducing the number of Members of Parliament coming to this House altogether.
	I want to go through the points that I made earlier in more detail. The often-repeated claim that there is a dislocation of the electorate from the political process and a public disenchantment with politicians is often accompanied by the recognisable sound of hand-wringing and swift, energetic and urgent efforts to do absolutely nothing about the problem. The public have a perception that we vote ourselves generous pay rises and allowances and more favourable pensions than we offer to them. Of course, we need to address those issues as well. There is also a perceptionI think that it is rightthat we lead a relatively charmed and luxurious life in the House, in comparison with the majority of our constituents. Failing to face up to the tough choices will result in our continuing to lose respect, when we need to regain the respect that I believe that the majority of hard-working right hon. and hon. Members richly deserve.
	With regard to the comparison with other countries, the House of Commons Library has provided me with some figures. The United Kingdom has more MPs than other European countries, and a smaller electorate than comparable democracies. For example, the UK has a population of nearly 59 million and 659 Members of Parliament, giving each constituency an average population size of 89,410. In Germany, the average constituency population size is 136,000. Spain has a population of 40 million, and 350 Members of Parliament, making the average constituency population size 115,000. In France, the average population size is 102,000. In the Netherlands, which has a population of only 16 million, there are 150 Members and an average population size of 107,000. In the United States, the average population size for Congress is 658,000; in Japan, the figure is 264,500. We need to address that matter and compare ourselves with other countries.
	Issues clearly arise as a consequence of devolution, but it is not the intention of the Bill to focus on one country or place that has been the subject of devolution. We should spread the painor, rather, the opportunityof this process. I believe that we should introduce these measures across the country, whether a process of devolution is in place or not.
	On savings, the House of Commons Commission's annual report recognised that Members of Parliament cost the equivalent of about 211,000 per annum, which covers pay, allowances, office costs and so on, but there are other costs in respect of running this place. If we were to reduce the number of Members to 500, my estimate is that we would make savings of 40 million per annum. We should ask the electorate what they would rather we spent that money on; hospitals, schools, and other public services, or maintaining an inappropriate number of Members of Parliament in this House?
	There are other operational reasons concerning the efficiency of the House that I do not have the time to go into. However, our debates are oversubscribed and there is the fundamental issue of comfort; not, perhaps, for the present debate, but certainly for others when we do not have enough room.
	The second part of the Bill is to aid the process of moving towards referendums so that devolution can be accelerated. Currently, a referendum decision is entirely within the gift of the Government. Devolution is about letting go, not holding on. We have a void at the centre of Government policy that is based on a flimsy tautology, which basically says that a region is a region because it is a region. We must question the way in which the Government approach the matter and allow communities, a proportion of the population and local authorities to be able to call their own referendums.
	The House might expect me to say that because I very much favour a referendum for Cornwall, where more than 50,000 people10 per cent. of the population of Cornwallhave signed a petition in favour of such a proposal. The people need to be listened to.
	I do not believe or expect that I will succeed today because parliamentary time is running away from me, but the Government must take heed of the issues. I know from speaking to many hon. Members that there is widespread support for the measure and concern about the dislocation between the political process and the electorate. We must address that point and the issue of savings, and we need to make a comparison with other countries. We must make efforts to ensure that we resurrect a better engagement between this House and the electorate.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by
	Mr. Andrew George, Mr. Graham Allen, Mr. Anthony Steen, Mr. Colin Breed, Nick Harvey, Sue Doughty, Mr. Paul Tyler and Matthew Taylor.

Representation of the People (Consequences of Devolution)

Mr. Andrew George accordingly presented a Bill to make provision for a reduction in the number of Members of Parliament; to make provision for referendums on regional assemblies; and for connected purpose: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 21 November, and to be printed [Bill 165]. Opposition Day

[18th Allotted Day]

State Pension Reform

Mr. Speaker: I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

David Willetts: I beg to move,
	That this House expresses its deep concern at Government policies that have led to a decline in funded pension provision and a massive extension of dependence on means-tested benefits; deplores the 5 billion per annum pensions tax and the erosion of incentives to save, which have caused the halving of the Savings Ratio, and have resulted in only 19 per cent. of final salary pension schemes remaining open to new members; condemns the Government for extending dependence on means-testing to over half of pensioners, despite earlier promises to the contrary, and for ignoring the interests of 1.4 million of the poorest pensioners who, on the Government's own target, will still not be receiving Pension Credit in 2006; notes that Government policies have created a big disincentive to save and led to an increase in the number of pensioners in persistent poverty; and calls on the Government to support state pension reform to reduce dependence on means-tested benefits, to remove the disincentive to save, to improve the financial position of pensioners, including the 1.4 million poorest pensioners, and to provide better incentives to save.
	I begin by drawing the House's attention to the relevant entries in the Register of Members' Interests.
	We have called this debate because the Government never debate pensions in this House. We have had two Government statements on pensions in the past year but no debate on the pensions crisis, despite the semi-promise that was given when my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) raised the matter during a debate held earlier this year. He called for a debate on the Government's Green Paper proposals on pensions, and the then Minister for Pensionswe miss him so muchsaid in his inimitable style:
	Do not be so silly. I have made it absolutely clear that I welcome debates in the House.[Official Report, 20 January 2003; Vol. 398, c. 58.]
	The then Minister also said that the Government would provide opportunities for debate, but there have been no such opportunities. On each occasion that this House has debated the pensions crisis, it has done so because the official Opposition or another party has called Ministers here to do so. The Government have failed to provide at any point a debate in which Members can give their views on their consultation document.
	Meanwhile, as the Government produce their Green Papers and make their statements, what has been happening? The pensions crisis has steadily worsened. The CBI pointed out that, in the past year alone, more than half the companies that it surveyed closed their final salary pension schemes. Final salary funded pension schemes are closing, and at the same timethe next step in this process took place last weekmore and more pensioners are on means-tested benefits. The arrival of the pension credit means that, for the first time in a long while in British history, more than half of all pensioners are eligible for means-tested benefits.
	We called this debate because we think that those two trends in our societyfewer funded pensions and greater dependence on means-tested welfareconstitute the wrong direction for our country to take. We wish to reverse those trends: we want more funded pension saving and fewer pensioners being dependent on means-tested benefits, but the Government's policies have caught us in a vicious spiral. As savings go down, more and more pensioners become dependent on means-tested benefits; and as entitlement to the latter is expanded, fewer people believe that it is worth while saving. That is the pernicious and vicious cycle in which we are now caught, and out of which we need to break.

Michael Fabricant: Does my hon. Friend agree that although we allparticularly those who are borrowingwelcome low interest rates, the crisis is being exacerbated by the fact that the income of those who have money on deposit is also being diminished?

David Willetts: My hon. Friend makes an important point that I shall come to later. He is absolutely right: as interest rates have fallen, pensioners with modest savings in a building society have lost particularly heavily, and they lose under the pension credit.
	Things were not supposed to be like this. The Government made it clear in their first Green Paper of 1998one of its authors is here today, and, as always, he is very welcomethat pensioners were then getting 60 per cent. of their income from benefits and 40 per cent. from funded pension savings, but that the Government's objective was to reverse that ratio, so that in future pensioners would get 60 per cent. of their income from funded savings and only 40 per cent. from benefits. In pursuit of cross-party consensus on these important matters, we are happy to endorse that very desirable objective, which we believe in and are committed to. Sadlyas with so many of the Government's targetssince they announced that target the percentage of income that pensioners get from social security and welfare has gone up, and the percentage that they get from funded savings has gone down.
	They are heading in the wrong direction.
	The latest evidence for that was the arrival last week of the pension credit, for which more than half of all pensioners are eligible. It is a far cry from the pledge made by the Chancellorthen shadow Chancellorto the Labour party conference only 10 years ago, when he said:
	I want the next Labour Government to achieve what in 50 years of the Welfare State has never been achieved. The end of the means test for our elderly people.
	That is not what Labour says now. We heard yet again at today's Prime Minister's questions a defence of the means test, despite the fact that many pensioners dislike it, that the savings industry opposes it and that there is mounting evidence that it does not work.

Steve Webb: The hon. Gentleman issued a press release just before the Tory party conference entitled, Tories to end the pensioners' means test by restoring earnings link. This afternoon, he has referred to reduced means-testing. Given that the press release promised to end it, in which decade does the hon. Gentleman envisage that happening?

David Willetts: We have set out our proposals and I shall talk about them later in my speech. Over time, our objective is to get more pensioners off the means test. A target is necessary, and ours is to increase the value of the basic state pension so that it catches up with the level of the means-tested benefit. That is how British social security policy has always operated. The breach in the British way of running social security came under the present Government, who have put means-tested welfare so much higher than the basic state pension. That is the source of many of our troubles.

Several hon. Members: rose

David Willetts: I want to make some progress and explain why Conservative Members are opposed to the spread of means-testing and, most recently, to the operation of the pension credit.
	Ministers will say that it takes only one phone call to claim the pension creditbut some phone call it is! Pensioners have to reveal to the official at the other end of the line all the details of their financial affairs, all their savings and all their money around the house. In practice, they have to empty their pockets to a civil servant in order to receive a means-tested benefit. That is why pensioners, their representatives and the industry itself do not like means-testing. Let me quote the views of Help the Aged, which states:
	Help the Aged believes that the Pension Credit is totally over-engineered . . . It would be so much simpler, and fairer, to boost the basic state pension.
	That is Help the Aged's view and everyone knows that the pension credit is far too complicated.
	Ministers say that after the one phone call pensioners can continue to receive the pension credit for five years without any interference or involvement. What Ministers do not say is how many different changes of circumstances have to be reported to officials. Pensioners have to tell officials if they have started marrying or cohabiting. They have to report whether they have diedI suppose that is logical. They have to report divorce or separation from a partner; change of name, address or payment location details; changes to any paid work; going into hospital or care home; going into prison and even joining a religious order. That is the information that the Government require.

Andrew Smith: In making his case, does the hon. Gentleman believe that he is encouraging pensioners to apply for what they are entitled to, or discouraging them?

David Willetts: Let me make it clear that we all believe that every person should secure the benefits to which they are legally entitled. Hon. Members on both sides of the House will do their best to help constituents find their way through the incredibly complicated process of securing the pension credit.

Andrew Selous: Does my hon. Friend share the concern of one of my constituents who, when he rang up to find out about the pension credit on behalf of his elderly mother, was told that he had rung the wrong number? He was then transferred to a further three people in the Pension Service, only one of whom was an expert and none of whom could provide an explanation of his mother's entitlement to pension credit. In view of the length of time that the Government have had to introduce it, does my hon. Friend agree that that is a shambolic state of affairs?

David Willetts: Yes, and it is a subject on which the Secretary of State made a written statement to the House yesterdayand it was indeed dismal news. The Secretary of State said that 1.9 million pensioner households were on the system and being paid the pension credit, but almost all of them had previously been in receipt of the minimum income guarantee and had been automatically transferred. After six months, it appears that only 200,000 extra pensioners are receiving the pension credit. The Secretary of State, having watcheddoubtless in horrorthe shambles that the Treasury made of the introduction of the child tax credit, had the ingenious idea that he could secure the smooth roll-out of the pension credit, provided that not many pensioners claimed itthe ultimate in bureaucratic mentality. Trains will run on time, provided that there are not any passengers; benefits can be paid smoothly, provided not many pensioners claim them. That is not how we believe the social security system should be run.

Bill Tynan: What would the hon. Gentleman say to one of my constituents who informed me this week that, as a result of the pension tax credit, he will gain 26 a week from October this year? Would he tell my constituent that that should no longer exist?

David Willetts: I am again grateful for the opportunity to make the position clear. The Prime Minister outrageously misrepresented our proposals at Prime Minister's questions earlier this afternoon. Our proposals involve no change whatever in entitlements to the pension credit. Rather, we believe in increasing the value of the basis state pension slowly over time, so that fewer pensioners need to claim the pension credit. It is not part of our policy to abolish the pension credit.

Several hon. Members: rose

Lynne Jones: Is not the hon. Gentleman rather misleading the House when he says that the Conservative policy is to allow the basic state pension to catch up with the means-tested benefit? In fact, he would allow that to happen by holding down the means-tested benefit and ending its link to earnings.

David Willetts: The hon. Lady raises an issue on which I hope to receive some clarification from Ministers in the debate. In the course of preparing our own proposals, we attempted clearly to establish the Government's own proposals for the future of means-tested benefits and the pension credit. The Government have several times been asked to clarify whether they believe that the value of the pension credit would increase in line with earnings if, by some extraordinary mischance, they were to win the next election, but they have failed to provide a clear answer. When we know the Government's intentions on the uprating of the minimum income guarantee and the pension credit, we will be able to make our response. However, we do not yet know the Government's proposals for the future of the pension credit.

George Foulkes: We now have an opportunity to find out what the Opposition intend. In common with my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan), I have a pensioner in my constituency who is 106 a week better off because of the Government's policies. Pensioners such as him are worried that they would lose out if, by some mischance, the Tories came to power. Will the shadow Secretary of State tell the House whether the Conservatives intend to spend more or less money on pensioners? If it is more, from where will they find the extra moneys?

David Willetts: Yes, we propose to pay more money to pensioners and we shall pay for it by offsetting savings in means-tested benefits and by the abolition of the new deal, which will allow us to increase the value of the basic state pension. Those are our proposals: no pensioners will lose and many will gain from them.

Several hon. Members: rose

David Willetts: I want to make some progress with my speech. I have already taken many interventions and explained that the main problems with means-testing are complexity and low take-up.
	The Prime Minister said today that the Government's approach provided targeted help for pensioners on the lowest incomes, but I am afraid that that is not so. I am sure that Labour Members who are genuine in their concern about poverty will be familiar with the statistics on the take-up of income-related benefits, which show that many pensioners who are entitled to means-tested benefits do not claim them and that many of them are among the poorest pensioners in our society. They are the people who are not reached by a Government who have become obsessed with spreading means-testing. I refer the Secretary of State and the House to table 1.10 on page 22 of the Department for Work and Pensions statistics on the take-up of benefits. I am sure that the Secretary of State is familiar with the document. It shows that approximately 60 per cent. of all the pensioners who do not claim means-tested benefits are in the poorest 20 per cent. for pensioner incomes. Our policy will help them, because our policy reaches the parts that the Government's policies do not reach.
	I will not take seriously assessments of our policies that assume 100 per cent. take-up of means-tested benefits as the alternative approach. As one of the fundamental problems with the Government's approach is low take-up, it would be wrong, even absurd, to compare our policy, which would get to everyone, with an alternative approach that, sadly, does not reach many of the pensioners who are entitled to the benefits.
	To prove how pernicious the spread of means-testing is, we asked actuaries to calculate how much people would need to save during their working lives to secure sufficient income to float them off means tests in their retirement. The answer is the shocking figure of 180,000. That is why Britain has a savings crisis. That is why the savings industry tells us that it cannot encourage people to save. The industry is worried about being accused of mis-selling savings products if people retire and subsequently discover that they have lost means-tested benefits as a result of their savings. That is why our policy is not only right for pensioners, but is essential to get Britain back into the savings habit. Unless we can tackle the pernicious spread of means-tested benefits, millions of people will conclude that saving is not worth their while.

David Heathcoat-Amory: Unless pensioners are able to save, they will not be able to bear the burden of the council tax. At Prime Minister's questions earlier, the Prime Minister did not deny that the Chancellor was budgeting for a 7 per cent. increase in council tax next year and a 6.5 per cent. rise the following year. Is it not grossly hypocritical for Downing street to announce that it is considering forcing local authorities to have referendums before imposing council tax rises of more than twice the rate of inflation? Why are the Government raising expectations when they know that they cannot deliver?

David Willetts: My right hon. Friend is right. Relations between No. 10 and No. 11 have reached the stage that No. 10 says that it will try to pass laws to stop people doing what No. 11 says is necessary for the public revenues to be secured. As an example of the failure of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to communicate with each other, it is outrageous.

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman will no doubt have read the Rowntree report that came out at one minute past midnight today. It says:
	Calculated after housing costs, more than 1.2 million pensioners will have been raised above the poverty line by policies that include the Minimum Income Guarantee.
	It also says:
	Without the recent improvements made to the tax and benefits system for those with low incomes, poverty would be much worse.
	Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the Rowntree trust?

David Willetts: One of the best refutations of the Rowntree trust was in that widely read document, Opportunity for all, the fifth annual report that the Government produced only a few weeks ago. Page 200 gives the evidence on the percentage of older people living in low-income households and with persistent low incomes. [Interruption.] Well, they say it is out-of-date[Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. Let the hon. Gentleman reply.

David Willetts: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have to work very hard reading these tedious documents and now and again I like to share the little gems that I find with the House.
	Page 200 contains a chart entitled Percentage of older people living in low-income households and it shows the percentage of pensioners with persistent low incomes who have had incomes
	Below 60 per cent. of the median income in three out of the previous four years.
	It shows a slowly increasing trend in the number of pensioners in that group, from 16 per cent. in the mid-1990s, to 17 per cent. and, in the latest three-year period, to 18 per cent. The Government's policy is not working because people do not like all these means tests.
	As the Secretary of State knows, I have great respect for him and I do not lightly throw around charges that he has produced misleading information. However, I am very troubled that his information leaflet on the pension credit contains the assertion, which he endlessly repeats, that the pension credit
	guarantees everyone aged 60 and over an income of at least 102.10 if you are single; or 155.80 a week if you have a partner.
	That is simply untrue. It is not correct. That is not how the pension credit works. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) pointed out, if someone has modest savings, the pension credit assumes an income from those savings of 10 per cent. That is an interest rate on savings way above what any pensioner in the real world is able to secure. However, that assumption was made for the purpose of modelling the pension credit. I shall not inflict the detailed calculations on the House although I would be happy if the Secretary of State wished to intervene to correct my calculations. They show that a single pensioner with savings of 20,000 held in national savings, earning 3.1 per cent., would be assumed to receive an income of 26.92 a week on the 14,000 of her savings above the limit of 6,000, which she would simply not receive. As a result, her total income from her savings, the basic state pension and the pension credit to which she is entitled would be 98.78 a week, not 102.10. Any pensioner with savings of between 6,000 and 54,000 is caught in that trap. It is not the case that pensioners are guaranteed 102.10 a week under the pension credit. I hope that the Secretary of State will accept that the information leaflet is seriously misleading. It is just not the case that the pension credit works in the way that he claims.

Patrick McLoughlin: My hon. Friend should not be surprised by that. The Government do not want pensioners to save, because they want people to be dependent on the state. That is the message that pensioners get time and again from the Government. They are told to forget saving because it is irrelevant and even irresponsible.

David Willetts: My hon. Friend gets to the heart of the issue. One of the worst and most pernicious examples of intrusive government is requiring millions of pensioners to fill in detailed claim forms to get means-tested benefits. The Conservative way is to try to roll back the means test, and provide people with a decent state pension, under which they are 1 better off for every 1 they save. That is what pensioners want.

Sally Keeble: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

David Willetts: No, because I must conclude so that the other hon. Members who wish to speak in this debate have a chance to do so.
	We have been driven by an ineluctable logic through the following stages of argument. We have concluded that means-testing under this Government has increased, is increasing and should be diminished. We wish to see pensioners off the means test. We also do not believe that it would be right to take any benefits away from pensioners. We do not propose to take cash off pensioners, because none of us believes that that would be the right thing to do. The only way, therefore, to roll back the means test is by increasing the value of the basic state pension so that it catches up with the value of the means-tested benefits. What more powerful way is there to signal a slow but steady process of increasing the value of the basic state pension than by saying that we will increase it in accordance with earnings rather than prices? That is the policy that we have put forward as a way of rolling back the means test.
	Paradoxically, the policy can be financed because the Government have spread means-tested benefits so far. They have got more than half of pensioners on the pension credit. For all those pensioners, we will replacegradually and over timethe income that they get from their means-tested benefits, and instead provide them with money on the basic state pension.
	Labour Members always argue that the problem is that large numbers of very rich pensioners will gain from our policy, so I refer them to another classic publication from the back catalogue of the Department for Work and Pensions. The pensioner incomes series measures pensioner incomes by quintileevery 20 per cent. of population. It shows that nearly 80 per cent. of pensioners have below-average incomes. It is not the case that there are large numbers of rich pensioners. The figures for the five quintiles are as follows. The poorest pensioner couples have a gross income of 165 a week. The next poorest get 221 a week, rising through 276 and then 373. The top fifth of pensioner couples get 889 a week.
	It is not the case that there are large numbers of very affluent pensioners. Only the top 20 per cent. of pensioners are anywhere near what the rest of society would regard as prosperity. I would rather that they faced a 40 per cent. tax rate on their incomes than that millions of pensioners on much lower incomes faced a marginal rate of 40 per cent. at the best, and quite possibly of 100 per cent.
	The Conservative party has proposed a clear direction of travel that tackles the two problems at the heart of our savings crisis. First, we are proposing increases in the value of the basic state pension that will enable us, over time, to take pensioners off means-tested benefits by replacing those benefits with a decent state pension. Secondly, we are proposing measures to tackle the problem of the lack of incentives to save by introducing a much better way of using the incentives currently in contracted-out rebates. We believe that the combination of a simple, decent and straightforward basic state pension, with strong incentives to save, is the only practical way of solving the pensions crisis faced by the country.
	I commend the proposals to the House.

Andrew Smith: I beg to move, To leave out from House to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	welcomes the fact that people are living longer than ever before; welcomes Government action to tackle pensioner poverty and to promote retirement flexibility, occupational pension security and informed choice; condemns the inheritance of 1997, with millions of pensioners in poverty, many being expected by the Government to live on under 68 a week, and the legacy of pension mis-selling; endorses the Work and Pensions Committee's judgement that current policies have been successful in reducing pensioner poverty; notes that the Government is spending 9 billion extra per year in real terms on pensioners compared with the 1997 system; further notes that this is 5.7 billion more than if the basic pension had been linked to earnings; applauds the fact that the poorest third of pensioners will be 1,600 a year better off; welcomes the successful payment of Pension Credit from this month to over two million pensioners and the fact that 1.3 million are gaining more money than they had before; further supports the Government's approach to renew the pensions partnership, outlined in the recent Green Paper and Action Plan; commends plans to introduce a Pension Protection Fund, guaranteeing protection if a company scheme winds up; welcomes proposals to allow individuals to defer their state pension and draw it as a lump sum; looks forward to further measures enabling people to make an informed choice in pension provision, increase flexibility approaching retirement and to work free from age discrimination; and condemns the unfair, unaffordable and unsustainable policies of Opposition parties.
	In moving the amendment, I am happy to set the record and proposals of this Labour Government against what we have just heard from the Opposition. This Government recognise the challenges that this country faces on pensions, and we are taking action to deal with pensioner poverty, to protect the pension promise, to help people save and to enable people to choose when to retire.
	On pensioner poverty, pension credit is getting more money to those who need it and rewarding those with modest savings. On occupational pensions, we have said that we will legislate for a pension protection fund, and take action to stop firms dumping their pension obligations. On savings, we are simplifying the tax regime, enabling peopleespecially womento build up rights in short-stay jobs, and giving people the information that they need to make their own choices on pensions.
	On flexible retirement, we are giving people more options on when to retire, tackling age discrimination, and giving a better deal to those who defer their state pension. However, we will not force people to work longer, which is why we have not proposed raising the state pension age.
	The House should remember that it is thanks to the reforms that this Government have put in place that, from next April, we will be spending more than 9 billion extra in real terms than in 1997. That is 5.7 billion more than if the basic pension had been uprated in line with earnings.

Paul Flynn: Does my right hon. Friend recall that for five successive years under this Labour Government, early-day motion 1 called for a restoration of the link between earnings and pensions. In some years more than 100 hon. Members signed the motion, but no Conservative Member ever did. Moreover, the Conservatives did not support the restoration of the link after the Conservative Government broke it in 1980. Does my right hon. Friend think that the Opposition's sudden Pauline conversion to the idea of restoring the link is nothing more than a shameless piece of opportunism?

Andrew Smith: Yes, I do, and I shall have more to say on that later.

Andrew Selous: How can the Secretary of State tell the House that the Government are giving money to the pensioners who need it most when we have just heard that the pensioners in the most persistent poverty are either unwilling or unable to take up the very benefits that he is talking about?

Andrew Smith: This Government have introduced the minimum income guarantee and improved it by means of the pension credit. That means that we are getting much more help to the poorest pensioners. That is borne out by the statistics for households on below-average incomes. On the basis of an absolute measure of poverty, more than 1.5 million pensioners have been taken out of poverty thanks to what this Government have done.
	The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) referred to cross-party consensus. I am all for a bit of that where we can establish it. However, that cause will not be helped by a Conservative party that has learned so little from its last time in office. We will take no lectures from a party whose record on pensions has so often been part of the problem and not part of the solution. The truth is that on one issue after another this Government are acting where the Conservatives failed to act. When the Conservatives were in power, they chose to increase the value of the basic state pension just once in 18 yearsand then only to compensate for imposing VAT on fuel. They left millions in poverty, and expected the poorest pensioners to live on just 68.80 a week. It is this Government who have made sure that no single pensioner need live on less than 102 a week, and that no pensioner couple need live on less than 155 a week.

Patrick McLoughlin: My hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) pointed out that the pension credit deems that some pensioners will earn 10 per cent. interest on their savings. Will the Secretary of State tell my constituents where they can get 10 per cent interest on their savings?

Andrew Smith: I do not blame the hon. Gentleman for asking that question, as the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) slipped in what he really meant so quickly that one might not have noticed. The claim was not that people could earn 10 per cent. He actually referred to a 10 per cent. attributed rate above 6,000. We must remember that 93 per cent. of pensioners have less than 10,000 in savings. There is no attributed rate on the first 6,000, but the rate is 1 for each 500 of savings above that level. On 10,000, that equates not to 10 per cent. but to 4.2 per cent. That is the truth hidden in the small print of what the hon. Member for Havant said.
	I am proud that it is this Government who are guaranteeing, through the pension credit, an income of 102 a week for single pensioners and of 155 for couples. We are also rewarding saving, whereas the Opposition penalised it by pound-for-pound withdrawals. Carp though they do about the pension credit, means-testing and the rest, the Opposition should have the grace to admit that, with the introduction of the pension credit, the Government have taken an important step away from pound-for-pound withdrawal. In government, the Opposition gave the strongest possible signal that it did not pay to save. Under this Labour Government, it does pay to save.

Gregory Barker: The Secretary of State has spoken about taking action, but the Government have in fact taken billions and billions of pounds out of pension funds. Since the Chancellor's first 5 billion tax raid, how much money year on year has been taken out pension funds in the past six years?

Andrew Smith: All hon. Members know that that was part of a comprehensive reform of corporate tax. The rate of corporation tax was cut by 3 per cent. as a way of ending the perverse incentive that existed in the system to distribute money through dividends rather than to reinvest it. I respect the sincerity with which the hon. Gentleman speaks, but I would have a great deal more respect for Conservative Members when they make such complaints if one of their Front-Bench team would pledge to reintroduce the dividend tax credit. They have been challenged time and again to do so and that is not their policy, so it is an argument that carries no force.

Several hon. Members: rose

Andrew Smith: I shall make a little more progress before I give way.
	As a result of the pension credit and the other measures that we have introduced since 1997, the poorest third of pensioners are on average 600 a year better off than if the same money had been put into raising the basic state pension. The Conservative party was happy with the situation where pensioners who had saved had their benefit withdrawn pound for pound, giving the strongest possible signal that it did not pay to save. This Government, with the pension credit, are for the first time rewarding those who have saved and who have so often just missed out.
	People will never forget that it was the Tories who presided over the pension mis-selling saga, leaving hundreds of thousands short-changed, just as they changed the rules on inherited SERPS, halved their value and forgot even to tell those affected. This Government have had to sort out the mess and take action to rebuild confidence in the system. This Government will stop employers walking away from their obligations, stop companies using takeovers to scrap pensions, and stop firms changing schemes without consultation.

John Robertson: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Opposition have shown their true colours here today by speaking about the top 10 per cent. and forgetting the bottom 60 per cent.the people they should be looking after? Once again, the Opposition show that they have no concern and no care for the poor.

Andrew Smith: Yes, indeed. The Conservative party's proposals would do relatively more for better-off pensioners and relatively less for the poorer pensioners. It was ever thus.

Maria Eagle: What a surprise.

Andrew Smith: Indeed. The truth is that both on state pensions and occupational pensions we are taking the action that is necessary. We are concerned that a pension promise made must be a pension promise honoured. That is why we will introduce a pension protection fund to give employees the protection that the Tories never saw fit to provide. The fund will step in to guarantee that, when a sponsoring employer goes bust and the pension scheme is underfunded, pensions already in payment will continue to be paid out in full and, subject to a salary cap, those who expect a pension will be guaranteed up to 90 per cent. of that entitlement.
	I listened to what the Conservative spokesman was saying about pension credit. Not for the first time, we heard those on the Opposition Front Bench twisting and turningfirst, deriding Labour proposals and then being forced by public opinion to accept them. Does the hon. Member for Havant remember the winter fuel payment? He called it a gimmick and pledged that the Conservatives would abolish it. We do not hear much about that any more, do we?
	On the pension credit, the Conservatives have carped and criticised. First, they said that they would scrap it; then they said that they would reconsider it; now, they say that they are going to keep itand so they should, because around half of all pensioner households will be eligible and stand to gain 400 a year on average. As of last week, pension credit is helping more than 2 million pensioners throughout the country.
	Despite the claims from the Opposition parties, the systems are working well. More than 1 million pensioners have already contacted us and feedback is showing that they like the help that they are getting from the Pension Servicethe first ever dedicated service for pensioners in this country.

Michael Jabez Foster: About 4,000 of my constituents are up to 30 a week better off in real money than they would have been under the old Tory system of simply keeping income support up to inflation levels. More importantly, does my right hon. Friend understand the Opposition's policy to be that they will not give another rise for the next seven years if we have to wait for pensions to catch up with present benefit levels?

Andrew Smith: That certainly seems to be the case. My hon. Friend is right. As I told my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson), Conservative policy consistently skews the odds against the poorest in the pension system, which is just what the Conservatives did when they were in office.
	We all realise that big challenges are facing the country in relation to pensions. Thanks to the good news that people are living longer, between us we need to save more or work longer, or some combination of the two, if we are to sustain a given standard of living in retirement. We have already set out a number of proposals for addressing these challenges.
	The recent announcements of the hon. Member for Havant and what he told us today fail three basic tests. First, they fail the test of affordability. It is just three years since the hon. Gentleman said that he opposed reintroducing the earnings link as it was not affordable. Nothing has changed. That is why his figures continue to show that the sums do not add up. Even after taking more than 200 million off pensioners in extra taxthat is part of the cost calculations that he left out of his list todaythere would be a 500 million shortfall by year four of a Tory Parliament. That 500 million black hole would in reality be far bigger because they are claiming savings where there are none to be had. For example, they claim that they can save hundreds of millions of pounds by scrapping the new dealsnew deals that have now helped more than 1 million people into jobs. The evidence shows that the new deal for lone parents alone has saved the Exchequer 40 million pounds a year by getting people off benefits and into work. The report of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research on the new deal for young people showed that it was virtually paying for itself. The truth is that scrapping the new deals would make it harder to pay for pensions, not easier.
	Once again, the Conservative party is making the mistake of imagining that it can put Britain's finances in order by keeping people on the dole. The Conservatives have learned nothing from the last time they were in power, when the British people saw all too clearly that mass unemployment was the way not to stronger public finances but to a net public debt of 44 per cent. of gross domestic product, which is where they left it. They have not learned the lesson that we cannot pay for pensions tomorrow by pushing up unemployment today.
	Their failure on a second test, sustainability, is even more abject. I cannot honestly believe that the hon. Member for Havant does not know that. The further forward one looks, the more unsustainable Tory policy becomes, even though we all know that pensions policy should be for the long term. The hon. Gentleman told this House just three years ago that restoring the earnings link would be
	a wild and uncosted policy.[Official Report, 8 June 2000; Vol. 351, c. 440.]
	Before that, he had boasted to the House that his Government had taken the crucial step of
	ending the link between the basic pension and earnings
	and he pledged that he would resist the
	seductive politics, but dangerous economics
	that
	bedevilled state pension arrangements in other countries. [Official Report, 8 July 1993; Vol.228, c. 516.]
	The hon. Gentleman has been seduced into dangerous and unsustainable economics. At that time, he appeared to understand what he seems to have forgotten now. After five years, the earnings link costs 4.3 billion more; after 10 years, 9 billion more; and after 30 years, 45 billion more, which is equivalent to 14p on the basic rate of income tax. That is an unsustainable policy.

David Willetts: The Secretary of State said that nothing had changed, but something important has changed: now that the pension credit has arrived and is being implemented, more than half of all pensioners are on means-tested welfare and, as he knows, the predictions are that the number will grow and grow. That is what we need to reverse, and that will secure more than half the cost of delivering the earnings link.

Andrew Smith: That is another way of saying that what the hon. Gentleman purports to give with one hand he will take away from the poorest pensioners with the other. No wonder the shadow Chancellor admitted that the Tory policy would do nothing for the poorest pensioners in our community. Given that unsustainability, it is hardly surprising that only last week the hon. Gentleman's Front-Bench colleague, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), once again let the cat out of the bag when he admitted that
	we may have to make some further painful decisions
	to pay for the policy. He did not share his hon. Friend's confidence that they could afford it.
	The Conservatives should tell the British people what painful decisions they have in mind. Where will the axe fall? Will it be on schools or on the police, or will it be on the hospitals on which our pensioners rely? The whole House will have been struck by the Conservatives' failure to match our commitment to invest in hospitals and schools.

Lynne Jones: I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend that it is essential that pensions policy is sustainable in the future, not least to allow younger people, who are currently trying to make informed choices about pensions, to know what they can rely on. Does he think that such people can rely on the current Government's pensions package being in place when they reach retirement age, because as he is aware, most informed commentators do not think that that will be the case?

Andrew Smith: I assure my hon. Friend that the Government's record shows that we have given more help to all pensioners and, especially, extra help to poorer pensioners in the dramatic terms that I have already set out. The combination of above-inflation increases in the basic state pension, the introduction of the winter fuel allowanceup to 300 this winter for those aged over 80free eye tests, free television licences for the over-75s and the pension credit is the basis for helping pensioners out of poverty towards dignity and security in retirement. Of course, we shall need to do more for the future. Our record shows that as action becomes necessary, we will take it, but we shall do so on the basis of fiscal sustainability and financial prudence, not on the basis of opportunistic, unsustainable, half-cocked, half-baked, back-of-the-envelope, calculations like the Opposition's.

Bob Spink: As the right hon. Gentleman is talking about the Government's record on pensions, may I point out that it has been said that, under seven years of Labour Government,
	occupational pensions . . . have come under particular pressure, which has undermined people's confidence in pensions.?
	That is a quotation from a letter to me of 14 October, from no less a person than the Minister of State.

Andrew Smith: As I made clear earlier, we recognise that there is a challenge in relation to occupational pensions. I have already charted the history. What did so much to damage confidence was the whole mis-selling scandal, the Maxwell scandal and all the rest. Through our action to put in place a pension protection fund and our actions on full buy-outs on the wind-up of schemes and the requirement for protection under TUPEthe Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulationsso that firms cannot use takeovers or mergers as an excuse to scrap pension schemes, the Government are setting up the building blocks to restore confidence. We should have the support of the Opposition in doing so, because those proposals are supported by the

David Willetts: Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify an important point? Is it the Government's intention if re-elected to increase the value of the pension credit by earnings during the lifetime of the next Parliament?

Andrew Smith: Our pledge for this Parliament is to increase the pension credit by earnings, and so we will. As I told my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones), we will take such decisions for the future as are necessary and we will announce them at the proper time. Unlike what we have heard from the Opposition, those decisions will be based on what is financially responsible, fiscally prudent and sustainable. We are taking the long view and maintaining control of public expenditure, while the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are seeking a quick fix that they know cannot be sustained. They are putting a false prospectus to the nation's pensioners. They know that they could not sustain their policy in the future, any more than they thought a few months or years ago

Several hon. Members: rose

Andrew Smith: I must make a little more progress.
	Nobody can believe the Leader of the Oppositionwhoever that iswhen the Conservatives claim on one hand that they can make such huge spending commitments for the future while on the other claiming that they can cut taxes.
	The most important test that the Conservatives are failing is the test of fairness. Under their plan, as the shadow Chancellor conceded, nothing will be done to help the poorest pensioners, who would not only fall further behind but would see any increases in their state pension knocked straight off their pension credit. As a consequence, women would fare especially badly; half of them do not receive a full basic state pension so they would be seriously short-changed. With pension credit, women actually get two thirds of the available money, so our policy helps to tackle entrenched gender inequality while the Opposition would make it worse, as borne out by an analysis published this morning by the Pensions Policy Institute.
	On fairness, how typical it is of the Opposition to look for extra funds to benefit the better off by going straight to a cut in the support provided to unemployed people. That is madness, given that the best foundation for retirement and pensions is to have a job in one's working life, and given that the policies that the Opposition propose to abolish have helped more than 1 million people into work since 1997.
	The hon. Member for Havant has re-started his war on lone parents. He only called it off a year ago, so the truce did not last long. He will deny them their opportunity through the new deal for lone parents by his proposal to abandon it. Furthermore, he has not come clean about how young children will be affected by his plans to force lone parents to look for work. That is another part of the hidden arithmetic behind his plans. He and his colleagues must make it clear how young a child has to be before the Tories would allow its mother to stay at home to look after it.
	The Government have helped 200,000 lone parents into jobs and expanded child care provision, and we have also ensured that 15 million people on low to moderate earnings will be able to build up a better state pension. With the state second pension, 5 million carers and disabled people will for the first time be able to build up entitlement. Yet just as that is going into people's hands, along come the Conservatives with their half-baked plan to take it away. If their ramshackle policy were ever implemented, even the higher pension that they say they could deliver, taken with the scrapping of the state second pension, would eventually mean losses of 43 a week for millions of carers, disabled people and low earners.
	While the Tory policy is unfair, unsustainable and unaffordable, the Government will continue our drive to tackle pensioner poverty, while giving more help to all pensioners. With pension credit, we put the poorest first and reward saving.

Michael Weir: As the Secretary of State is talking about fairness, does he accept that one element of fairness is ease of applying? The problem with the pension credit is its complexity, even when applying by phone. I spoke to an old lady who phoned the helpline, got a recorded message that she did not understand and was so frustrated that she gave up, so we had to intervene on her behalf. What would the right hon. Gentleman say to her? There is a problem even applying for the pension credit.

Andrew Smith: I should be happy to look into any case that the hon. Gentleman or other hon. Members would like to raise with me. Both the feedback that we are getting and our own monitoring show that the pension credit application line is working remarkably well and that 94 per cent. of calls have been answered within 30 secondsnot by a mechanical answering machine, but by a human voice. People really appreciate the help that they are being given.
	I shall quote a letter in today's Daily Mail. It is not always my pleasure to quote the Daily Mail in the House, but I am pleased to do so now. The question at the head of the letter was, Is pension credit too hard to get? Someone wrote in and said:
	Here's my timetable for having obtained the new pension credit. I received the letter from the pension service and phoned through my application last month. I was connected in seconds. My application form was completed in 20 minutes. Two days later the form was returned to me for signature and proof of income. I returned the form, signed and with the relevant proof. On September 23 my application was approved. I received my payment book on September 29 and my first payment on October 6. The application process is very efficient.
	We are getting scores of messages from pensioners who not only find it easy to use the service, but are greatly appreciative of the individual help and support that they are getting from members of the Pension Service.
	The hon. Member for Havant spent a large part of his speech claiming that he would keep pension credit; that the Conservatives would not want to take money away; and that, yes, everyone should apply, while spending the rest of the his speech95 per cent. of itbranding the pension credit as means-testing, saying that it was complicated and effectively discouraging people from getting it.
	People are getting that help and receiving the credit itself from a dedicated Pension Service and, along with all the other things that we have done to make the application procedure simple and straightforward, the policy is a million miles away from the old-style means test and the images of carting people's furniture out the door that it raises in people's minds. All hon. Members ought to join in helping the whole country to understand that pension credit is an entitlement, that it is helping poorer pensioners and rewarding saving, that the Pension Service is doing a first-rate job in delivering it and that we should all get behind it and make it a success.

Huw Irranca-Davies: I have visited my local pension centre and the telephonists who deal with the pension credit, and I was assured that, on average, applications are dealt with in less than nine minutes. People in the remoter parts of my constituency have been visited in their homes by people from the local Pension Service to help them to complete the forms. It seems that we are bending over backwards to make things as easy as possible. I am sure that my right hon. Friend would agree that the worst disservice that the House could do would be to put obstacles in people's way and dissuade anyone from applying for what is rightfully theirs.

Andrew Smith: I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, especially in suggesting that praise is due to his constituency's local Pension Service, which is clearly doing such a first-rate job.

Kevin Brennan: Was my right hon. Friend as surprised as I was that the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) did not tell us about another of his hare-brained ideas for pensioners: that we need people to breed more to reduce the burden on the state? I know that the hon. Gentleman has been seduced by something that he previously spurned, but in thinking that he can affect the birth rate, is he not exaggerating his own allure?

Andrew Smith: I shall not comment on that, except to say that I read one comment on the hon. Gentleman's unfortunate remarks in which someone said that nothing would be more likely to put her off having children than the idea that those on the Tory Front Bench wanted her to.

Ann McKechin: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the biggest pension crisis that we have inherited is a lack of proper pension provision for many of the oldest women living in our society today? The Opposition have offered nothing to assist those women. In fact, their policies will specifically work against them.

Andrew Smith: Yes, indeed. I certainly accept that the pension credit already has the potential to help much more effectively the older women on low incomes to whom my hon. Friend refers, but we must do even more, through the Pension Service, to ensure that they get their entitlement. As I said earlier, I believe that the fact that the pension credit comes through the Pension Service, rather than the social security system, helps to tackle the stigma. I invite any hon. Member to go out with those in the local Pension Service and to see the meetings that they are holding in sheltered housing schemes and lunch clubs and how they are sitting down with pensioners and helping them through this. That is the way in which we can ultimately ensure maximum take-up. I hope that I have the support of the whole House when I say that we want everyone to get their entitlement.
	I will draw my remarks to a close now, but I shall sum them up by saying that, whereas the Tory policy is manifestly unfair, unaffordable and unsustainable, the Government will continue our drive to tackle pensioner poverty, while giving more help to all pensioners. With pension credit, we both put the poorest first and reward saving. Looking more widely, we will simplify the occupational pensions landscape, removing millions of pounds of unnecessary cost and making it easier for firms to get on and run good schemes.
	We will offer the chance for flexible retirement, enabling people to combine part-time working with drawing a pension from the same employersomething that could be very populargiving a better deal when people choose to draw their state pension later and tackling the age discrimination that is still a barrier to so many. We will also drive forward with our measures to bolster occupational pensions security, working in partnership with employers and trade unions.
	As I have said, greater longevity brings challenges to both state and private pension provision, but we should never forget that longer lifespans are good news and that, to make the most of them, older people need security in retirement. They must be enabled to lead full and fulfilling lives. The measures that Labour has takenand the further steps to comewill help them do just that.

Steve Webb: Hearing the Conservative party's announcements on pensions in the past few weeks has felt like stepping into a parallel universe. The Government are pledged to extend mass means-testing, but the old Labour Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) demands that the link with earnings be restored. We might have assumed that a policy that became public only about 10 days ago would have formed the centrepiece of today's debate, so it is rather interesting to read the motion that the Conservative party has tabled. In rather a long motion about state pension reform, there is no mention of restoring the earnings link. If that is that party's flagship new policy, why is it not in the motion? It is possible that the Conservatives are not absolutely sure whether it is their party's policy, or whether it will survive any hypothetical change in leadership, for example.
	The Conservatives might, if they had the opportunity, restore the earnings link for perhaps four years, although the sums do not add up, but they will then break it again. As the Conservative party spent 18 years undermining the real value of state pensions, can pensioners believe that it will restore the link and keep it? The hon. Gentleman has already stated in the past that the earnings link is unsustainable in the long term, and the costings that the Conservatives have put together to show how it will be afforded simply do not stack up.
	During the hon. Gentleman's speech, I showed the House a press release from Conservative central office. That press release is not available on the Conservatives' website unless people have a password, but the password is available only to the press, because the Conservatives do not want the public to know what they are claiming about their policy because it is not true. The Conservative news press release is headed Tories to end the pensioners' means test.

Kevin Brennan: What is the password?

Steve Webb: I think that it is IDS, or something like that, but I cannot remember.
	The Conservative motion says nothing about ending the means test; it suggests reducing it. One of the problems with that policy is that it is relatively limited7 over four years does not take people a terribly long wayyet that has been elided into getting rid of the means test. The means test is 25 above the pension, not 7, so despite the policy being described as ending the means test, that will be nowhere near by the end of one Parliament. The first problem with the policy is therefore that its potential benefits are absurdly exaggeratedspin indeed.
	It gets worse. Other things are not included in the motion. The Conservative party conference also featured an announcement that the Conservatives want to scrap contracting out. That would give the hon. Member for Havant 11 billion burning a hole in his back pocket. He does not know what to do with ithe knows that he wants to scrap contracting out, which, dare I suggest it, is an 11 billion tax hike, and even I, in my wildest tax-and-spend moments would not go quite that farso he is going to consult the industry. I have a suggestion for him. His motion suggests that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for a 5 billion hole in pension funds. If he is going to have 11 billion burning a hole in his back pocket, why does he not pledge to use half of that to restore the dividend tax credit? That would have been a reasonable idea, but he did not propose it. Even when he has 11 billion to spend, spending it on restoring what is complained about in the motion is low on his list of priorities. His are crocodile tears.
	The critical point on which the Tory policy is dishonest is that it conceals the fact that the poorest pensioners will do worse under it, because we have seen the minimum income guarantee linked to earnings. The Tories want to pay for some of their policies through those recipients of the minimum income guarantee and the pension credit getting smaller rises in future years, which is part of how they make the sums add up. The hon. Member for Havant says that the people who are not claiming it will do well out of a good state pension, which is right. He would accept, howeverI think that he has used these numbersthat in a year or two roughly 3 million pensioner households will get the pension credit and 1 million will miss out. Of those 4 million poorest pensioner households in the land, therefore, three quarters will do worse under his policy than under maintaining the link with earnings of the means test.

David Willetts: The hon. Gentleman may not have been listening when I asked the Secretary of State what his policy was. I did so to establish whether the Government intended that the pension credit should be uprated by earnings not prices. In our careful costings, we have used the cautious assumption that the pension credit will rise in line with prices. If and when we hear any alternative policy proposed by the Government, we can decide how we should reply. He should work on the basis of what we have just heard from the Secretary of State, not on fantasies that the rise will be in line with earnings.

Steve Webb: We tend to judge political parties by their record in office. Whereas in their 18 years the Conservatives broke the linkso there is no reason to believe that they would restore itwe have the evidence that this Government have linked the means test to earnings and most of the projections produced by the Department for Work and Pensions are on that basis. If the Government go ahead with linking the means test to earnings, will the hon. Gentleman clarify what will be the Conservative policy in relation to poorer pensioners?

David Willetts: Wait and see.

Steve Webb: As the hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position, up to 3 million poorer pensioners will have to wait and see. It is therefore no surprise that the Pensions Policy Institute has looked at the Conservative proposals and has found that they favour the better off.

David Willetts: When I said, Wait and see, what I meant was that we will wait and see what the Government say they will do to the pension credit. It is perfectly reasonable for us to say that, in preparing our plans, until we know what they will do to the pension credit, it is sensible for us to assume price indexation, which is all that they are committed to do. In relation to the Pensions Policy Institute, does the hon. Gentleman accept that the other flaw in that analysis is that it assumes 100 per cent. take-up? As one of the big problems with these means-tested benefits is low take-up, there is no point modelling effects that assume away one of the biggest problems that we all know that our constituents face.

Steve Webb: The Pensions Policy Institute's analysis of the Conservative proposals published today considers an illustrative person who claims the pension credit. As I just said to the hon. Gentleman, of the 4 million poorest pensioner households in the land, we are agreed that 3 million will claim it, and 1 million will not. While the hon. Gentleman's proposal will be better for the 1 million who will not do so, it will be worse for the 3 million who will, because he wants to give them price indexation.

Kevin Brennan: As the hon. Gentleman has such a command of statistics, and as he is talking about illustrations, can he enlighten the House as to what proportion of pensioners in this country have savings of 20,000, as in the illustration given by the hon. Member for Havant?

Steve Webb: Among pensioners who might consider claiming the pension credit, it would certainly be a tiny fraction. The hon. Member for Havant made another somewhat disingenuous observation. He harangued the Government for assuming that pensioners can get 10 per cent. on their savings when they apply for the pension credit, not mentioning that when he helped to introduce this system in 1988, the assumed rate was 20 per cent. Perhaps he has changed his view.
	It gets worse. How will the largesse be paid for by scrapping the new deal, which is a flat amount every year, whereas the cost of the earnings link is a rising amount every year? That provides no sustainable way of paying for it. The hon. Gentleman's other proposal, apart from the netting off of means-tested benefits, which is of course what would happen, is forcing lone parents with secondary school age children to apply for jobs. Apparently, that would save 400 million a year by the end of this Parliament. I do not follow that logic. If we require a lone parent with secondary school age kids to look for work and she does not get it, we have not saved anything. If she does get it, unless it is a new job that has appeared like confetti from the sky, it is a job that someone else who was otherwise on benefit would have taken. Therefore, where does the 400 million come from, and how is the policy sustainable when most of it is paid for by abolishing something that costs the same amount every year? It simply does not add up. I hesitate to lecture the hon. Gentleman on fiscal rectitude, but as we believe in it in our party, I should share it with him.
	Reference has also been made to other aspects of the hon. Gentleman's proposals for solving the pension crisis. The hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) mentioned the fertility proposals of the hon. Member for Havant. I have been back to the Conservative website to find a rather amusing proposal on that front[Interruption.] There is a different password for the section on fertility. The hon. Member for Havant's policy is headed, Make more babies to solve EU population problems. It states:
	David Willetts has called on couples
	not single parents
	to have more children to counter Europe's ageing population and boost . . . flagging economic growth.
	Later, it mentions a good soundbite:
	Europe has a birth-dearth.
	The final line, if anyone understands a word of it, states:
	Feminism is the new natalism.
	The hon. Gentleman's solution to the pension crisis is therefore that couples have more babies. The trouble is that he wrote an article in Prospect this month entitled Too many kids. The general thrust of his argument is that on run-down estates there are too many kids and not enough adults. Therefore, it is really a problem of the wrong sort of people having the wrong sort of children.
	What we have had from the Conservatives is an entirely opportunistic policy of allegedly restoring the earnings link and breaking it in four years, smaller rises for the poorest pensioners that cannot be paid for anyway, scrapping rebateswhich is an 11 billion tax hike but they are not sure where the money will goand, dare I say it to the hon. Gentleman, saying different things to different audiences. I always find that very difficult.
	What of the Government's strategy for dealing with the pensions problem? The Secretary of State did not counter the hon. Gentleman's assertion that so far virtually everybody receiving the pension credit was already on the previous system. He published figures yesterday saying that 1.9 million pensioner households are now getting payments of pension credit. I understand that 1.8 million pensioner households, to the nearest 100,000, were getting the minimum income guaranteeI hope that he will correct me if I am getting anything wrong. That implies only about 100,000 to 150,000 new extra recipients. He has written to 1.6 million pensioner households, so fewer than one in 10 of them are gaining from those letters. If I am wrong on that, I hope that he will clarify the matter. That gives us real cause for alarm, however, about the prospects for hitting even his meagre take-up targets. If only one in 10 of the people to whom he writes are claiming, what prospect do we have of reaching the 4 million who should be entitled, or even the 3 million that he is trying to reach? If what is happening is that vulnerable pensioners are getting those letters and do not know what to do with them, or are not responding in significant numbers, his whole policy is flawed. He has not queried those numbers or that analysis, so we must take it that it is correct.
	The other key pension crisis that we need to address is confidence in occupational pensions. If people's occupational pension rights are not honoured, they will find themselves claiming state benefits, and many people do not want to be in that position. At our party conference, we were visited by workers from Allied Steel and Wire, including workers from the sister plant to the one in the constituency of the hon. Member for Cardiff, West, and by workers from Dexion in Hemel Hempstead. They will not benefit from the pension protection fund to which the motion refers, because it will come in too late for them.
	We have joked about a cross-party consensus, and a key question for the House is the problem faced by a relatively small number of people. About 20,000 seems to be the best estimate, but if the Secretary of State disagrees with that figure, I hope that he will provide me with an alternative. Those people have worked hard for firms and saved hard, but found as they came up to retirement that their company had gone bankrupt and that there was not enough money in the pension fund. Those people have lost catastrophically; they have lost not just a pound or two but potentially all their life savings.
	We met Dave Allen from Dexion in Hemel Hempstead, who told us that he was coming up to his 40th year of working for the company. All his pension was in that pot and, because he will receive virtually no pension, he feels that he has failed himself and has failed to provide for his wife in retirement. In the town where the company is based, the people who have retired and who are drawing their pensions cross the road rather than talk to him. They feel embarrassed, because they receive a pension when he will not. The problem is dividing communities and causing catastrophic losses for relatively small numbers of people.
	Although we are not talking about millions, the problem is critical for each of those whom it affects. I condemn the Government because they do not know how many people are affected. When a scheme winds up, the Government do not ask for and collect the information. Ros Altman and the campaign groups have been to see the Secretary of State and they have come up with their own estimates. They think that about 20,000 people are affected and that it will cost an average of 60 million a year to sort out the problem. The Secretary of State's Department has annual unallocated expenditures of 150 million for next year and 200 million for the year after that. I should have thought that, prior to the introduction of the pension protection fund, such a scheme would make good use of unallocated departmental resources to help a small number of people who would otherwise suffer catastrophically.
	I listened to the Secretary of State's conference speech with great care, and he repeated the same soundbite in his speech today. He said:
	A pension promise made must be a pension promise honoured. When a firm goes bust, it can't be right that workers see their life savings destroyed.
	We say Amen to that, but why is that not true now? Why will it be true only in 18 months' time? If a pension promise made should be a pension promise kept, why should not those workers receive some form of compensation? Governments of different parties have in some cases required them to join company schemesit was often a statutory requirementand the Pensions Act 1995 put them at the back of the queue when the schemes wind up. Subsequent legislation removed the requirement on companies to warn them that their pensions were not safe. These people have been done down by successive Governments, and they deserve compensation.

Kevin Brennan: We all understand the usual reluctance of Governments to legislate retrospectively, but is there not a special case to be made for such workers? I do not think that anyone, including even the most virulent opponent of the Conservative party, would suggest that the Pensions Act 1995 ever envisaged that workers would be left to suffer from the jaw-dropping injustice that resulted from the collapse of these companies. As the pension promise was made by successive Governments, is there not a case for considering providing compensation in these instances?

Steve Webb: That is right. It is helpful that the campaign group, for which I have an enormous amount of respect, has not called for future legislation to be made retrospective. It is not suggesting that these workers will be covered by the insurance scheme in some way. It has done the work that Government should have done by finding out how many people are affected and how much it would cost to solve the problem. The solution is relatively cheap, because if all the balances of the funds go into one big pot of money, it will not be necessary to buy annuities, which are very bad value for money. It will cost the taxpayer nothing for a few years and then, on average, 60 million a year. In the context of even the Department's spare cash, that is affordable.
	I hope that people across the parties will recognise that this small group of people has lost catastrophically. Some of them will end up claiming means-tested benefits if we do not help them, and the savings there have not even been included in the costs that I have given. The net cost could be less than I have suggested.

John Robertson: Will the hon. Gentleman tell me his party's policy on compulsory employer and employee contributions?

Steve Webb: I will deal with that point in a second, but I want to round off my points on the issue of compensation.
	Trying to amend the forthcoming pensions Bill against the will of the Government will always be an uphill struggle. I hope that between now and the final drafting of the pensions Bill further discussions will take place. I know that a number of Labour Members are keen for them to take place. My colleagues will be happy to help in a positive way to see whether something can be done. I know that many people have seen the Secretary of State and his colleagues about the issue, but the losses to some people are catastrophic. It is time that we addressed the problem.
	I know that many folk wish to contribute to the debate, so I shall draw my remarks to a close. However, I shall deal with the intervention that I have just taken. If the strategy is not mass means-testing or the opportunistic restoring of the earnings link for a few years and then stopping it, what is the alternative way forward? The hon. Member for Havant and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) used to saythe right hon. Gentleman still doesthat we can target poverty without resorting to mass mean-testing by using the fact that most poor pensioners are old pensioners. In that way, we avoid all the problems of take-up that the hon. Member for Havant referred to and can tackle the problem in a sustainable way. In the short term, using the state pension that is claimed but with additional amounts for older pensioners tackles poverty effectively. However, in the longer term, the Liberal Democrats believe that compulsory contributionswe would have to begin with employersare the way to ensuring that we do not let people retire poor and try to catch them inefficiently through a means test. We would make sure that as many people as possible build up good pension rights from the state and the private sector while they are working so that means-testing becomes for the few and not for the many.

Bill Tynan: I welcome this debate, but I am surprised that the Conservative party has chosen it for its Opposition day. Normally, it would select an issue on which the Government were failing and not making progress and on which the electorate were not benefiting from Government policy. When the Conservative party selected this debate, it was good news for the Government. Perhaps the choice is part of a plot to sustain the Labour Government in power until the Opposition manage, perhaps with a new leader, to attract some voter support.
	We have no need to apologise for what we have done for pensioners. Many issues have been raised, and I commend the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) on his thoughtful speech. He made several excellent points that I shall touch on briefly in my short contribution.
	Targeting payments at the poorest people is essential. They are not able to save for retirement, and current pensioners do no have that luxury. The poorest people never had the option of being able to save for retirement, so there is no contradiction between some people saving for retirement and others receiving benefit from the Government. Such benefit can support the people who need it most and who never had the chance to save in the past. We must dispel the myth that targeting the poorest pensioners will create the conditions in which people will not save. The pension credit overcomes that problem and it creates an opportunity for people who have saved.
	In the general election campaign, I remember speaking to someone whose support I was seeking. His big concern was the minimum income guarantee. He had contributed to a small occupational pension scheme and, because of that, he did not benefit from the minimum income guarantee. I was able to tell him that there would be a pension credit, and I asked for his vote. I hope that he voted for me. If he did not, he will now realise that what I said at the time was correct. We have introduced the pension credit and he will be one of the beneficiaries.
	The issue of occupational pension schemes has been raised. I have come across the problems caused when Melville Dundas went into liquidation in Scotland. People who had 36 years' service and contributed to a sixtieth pension scheme are now worried that they will receive nothing. They do not know whether they will get 100 per cent., 10 per cent. or 15 per cent. of their pension. They have been told that the matter is in the hands of Aon and that they will have to wait and see what money will be available from the pot. We must address that issue in the future.
	A television series that was broadcast over three Sundays a few weeks ago showed the dire poverty in which people lived in the early 1900s. I was fortunate because I was not born until 1940, but I lived in a tenement. Conservative Members might not know what a tenement isthey will never have lived in one.

Peter Duncan: I know them well.

Bill Tynan: I am delighted that someone knows what a tenement is. I lived in a two-room and kitchen with three sisters, my brother and my mother and fatherthere were seven of us. My mum and dad had to let one of the rooms so that they could survive in 1940. One should think about the means-testing that applied at that time and the disdain with which people were treated when they asked for help from the state. If their request was successful, the uniform that they were given to wear was made up of the same jacket, trousers, blouse and skirt, so it could be recognised that they had been to the parish. That was a real stigma for those people. My mum and dad were too proud to accept such help because they did not want their sons and daughters to be identified as those for whom their mum and dad could not provide. That is what I call means-testing.
	I despair when I hear people speaking about the 5 million people who are means-tested because elderly people in our society remember the stigma of the means-testing days. At the moment, we are reaching out to the people who most need our help. They have the opportunity to phone a helpline or ask a person such as an MP to help them to fill in a form so that they will receive more money. That is something that we should applaud. We talk about cross-party support, but if we were working efficiently and effectively, we would not worry about take-up because as long as we continue to refer to the means-testing that once existed and deprecate what exists now, we consciously encourage people not to participate in the pension credit. I implore every hon. Member to ensure that we do the best that we can to encourage people to take up the benefit.

Peter Duncan: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for acknowledging that at least one Conservative Member knows what a tenement is. I accept that hon. Members of all parties want all benefits to be accepted by as high a proportion of the population as possible. Why does he think that after three years of pension credit, 1.4 million pensioners, by the Government's figures, are still not in receipt of it?

Bill Tynan: There are people in this country who are in poverty and some who are not taking the opportunity to get recompense from the Government. We continue to debate means-testing but that system is stigmatised in this country. We must get out of the mindset of comparing the current system with what existed before. I believealthough I have obviously not impressed the hon. Gentleman given that he made his interventionthat it is essential that we do as should be done.

Oliver Heald: When the last Conservative Government were in power, the Labour party talked about means-testing. In Getting Welfare to Work, it said that means-tested benefits were claimed by more than 3.5 million people. The document went on to deplore the fact that 600,000 people did not receive the income support to which they were entitled and said that those people were forgoing 14 per week and were among the poorest in Britain. The Chancellorhe was not the Chancellor thencalled for the end of the means test. Now that Labour is in power and failing with the means test because people will not claim the benefit to which they are entitled, surely it is a bit rich for the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues to say, Oh, don't let's talk about this; let's keep it quiet. We should not keep it quiet because it is a disgrace.

Bill Tynan: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention but the final part of it was a disgrace. My position is clear. I am speaking from the perspective of the constituents whom I represent. I was not a Member in 1996 but I understand the damage that the Conservative party did to the poorest people in this country during its 18-year reignthat was a disgrace, as far as I am concerned. If we continue to have the mindset of depriving each other due to the means-testing provision, we will destroy a great opportunity for the people whom he and I represent.

Lynne Jones: Although my hon. Friend is right that we must try to encourage people to apply for the benefits to which they are entitled, stigma is not the only problem with means-tested benefits. Does he agree that there is a problem relating to younger constituents who try to make an informed choice about how to save for their retirement? We are not addressing the disincentive for younger people to save for retirement when they do not have a clue what the state will provide for them in 20, 30 or 40 years.

Bill Tynan: Occupational pension schemes are the key to moving forward on retirement. I was fortunate to be a member of a good occupational pension scheme. It was a sixtieth scheme that allowed me to transfer to a full-time officials' pension scheme and then the parliamentary scheme. No hon. Member will need the state pension when they retire because they will earn much more than 400 a week. I hear people talking about pensions as a universal benefit and saying that everyone should receive the same benefit. If that system is put against one that allows the poorest people to get more, I believe that the system should be run in the latter fashion. People might think that I am wrong but we should target the poor. I understand that one third of pensioners in this country receive more than 400 a week, although I am sure that I will be corrected if I am wrong. They do not need to be targeted because they receive a substantial pension. We need to target those who do not have a substantial pension at present, which is what the Government are doing.
	I accept that there are problems with occupational pension schemes. As I said, a constituent contacted me about Melville Dundas. He was a foreman but, unfortunately, he had no union representation at the plant. As a union official, I recognise the benefits of trade unionismI am sure that some hon. Members disagree with that. After 36 years' service with two years left to go, my constituent thought that he was protected for his retirement. He thought that his pension scheme would give him 17,000 a year but he is now in despair because he does not know how much he will receive. I ask the Government to consider seriously redressing the problem experienced by the 20,000 people who have been identified. It will not be easy to decide how to do that because those people will find themselves in a situation in which they might receive some money from the pension scheme. We may need to compensate people on a universal basis if, through no fault of their own, and through no fault of the Government, they are suffering because a company and its pension scheme, run by trustees, has gone bust. We should apportion blame where blame exists. We must be sympathetic and deal with the problem. The Government should seriously consider that.
	As for compulsion, I believe that employer contributions, whether they be 2.5 per cent. or 4 per cent., to occupational pension schemes are the best way forward for this country's future. We need to grasp the nettle on compulsion.

David Hamilton: Does my hon. Friend agree, however, that occupational pension schemes will not deal with the many hundreds of thousands of people who receive just above the minimum guaranteed wage? We will always have to look after that group because when they reach retirement age they might not have contributed enough.

Bill Tynan: I agree wholeheartedly, but we have to start somewhere. Once we address the problem of occupational pension schemes, we can move forward and deal with other problems.
	I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the debate. We need cross-party consensus on pensions because that will enable us to make progress on eradicating poverty. We make no apology for what this Government have done for pensioners. We no longer talk about the changes to the rules governing the 52-week stay in hospital, but those changes were sought for a long time. We have taken a great step forward. The debate is essential. I look forward to the Government considering the suggestions made.

Peter Lilley: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan), whose concern for pensioners is obviously genuine. All I say in response is that pensioners in my constituency do not think that it is politicians who stigmatise the means test, but that it is the means test that stigmatises them. They hate having to prove how little they have saved or have by way of income in order to claim benefits and to find that every extra pound of savings that they have made results in a loss of some, all or a commensurate amount of benefit.
	I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) on securing the debate and putting the focus on means-testing. That is central to the consideration of pension issues. It is good that the Opposition have chosen to debate pensions because the most important single issue facing every modern Government in developed countries is how to provide pensions for an ageing population with fewer children.
	The UK used to be better placed to face that problem than most of our European partners because we had persuaded more of our population to put aside savings. As a result, we had more funds to meet future pension liabilities not just than any other country in Europe, but than all our partners in the European Community put together. Now that very healthy situation is under threat. The situation with regard to the provision of occupational pensions, not least of defined-benefit pensions, is little short of meltdown. According to Adair Turner, the pensions tsar appointed by the Government, 60 per cent. of occupational schemes have already closed to new members and a further 10 per cent. have closed entirely, and that is weighted by membership of those funds. Employers are contracting members back wholesale into the state system. We know that that is not purely the Government's fault. The stock market fall was a shock to the system and the anticipated rises in longevity have increased the liabilities of pension funds, but the Government must stand convicted of imposing a 5 billion a year tax on pension funds and introducing means-testing, which will increasingly affect the majority of pensioners, thus making it less likely that they will save for the future.
	Four key questions have to be asked and, more important, answered when we consider what to do about pension provision. For those who cannot stay until the end of my speech, they can obtain a copy of Save Our Pensions for 15 from the Social Market Foundation or free from my website, www.peterlilley.co.uk.
	The first key question is how much, if any, pension provision should people be required to make during their working life? My conclusion is simple. Everyone in work should be required to provide for a pension that will be sufficient to avoid dependence on means-tested benefits when they retire. That is the ideal. I do not prejudge whether that provision should be made through a state pay-as-you-go system or funded savings. When I initially considered the matter, I was hostile to compulsion until I reflected that we already compel people to contribute towards the basic state pension and the state second pension if they are in employment. We also compel taxpayers, including those who have made voluntary provision for themselves over and above anything required by the state, so ensuring that they do not need means-tested benefits, to pay through the tax system for those who do need means-tested benefits.
	We would all agree that everyone should pay through the tax system to provide help for those in retirement who need means-tested benefits because during their working lives they could not provide a sufficient pension for retirement, perhaps as a result of disability, unemployment or some other misfortune. But is it right to compel people to pay through the tax system to provide state benefits for those who could have made provision for their old age but failed to do so? It is better that the compulsion, if it exists in the system at all, should compel everyone to provide for a basic minimum pension for their retirement, sufficient to ensure that they do not need state means-tested benefits if at all possible.

John Robertson: I know that the right hon. Gentleman is knowledgeable about pensions. He talks about compulsion for the employee. What about the employer?

Peter Lilley: The compulsion applies to employee and employer because they both contribute to the national insurance system and, through that, to the state system, and to people who contract out but who receive rebates from national insurance. I hope that that answers the hon. Gentleman's question.
	The second key question is, how much of any compulsory requirement of provision for retirement income should be funded by saving? I concluded that the state second pension should be replaced by a mandatory funded pension system set at a level, together with the basic state pensionwhich would remain unchangedthat is sufficient to float clear of means-tested benefits. The Government have set an admirable target of increasing the proportion of future pension liabilities that are met from genuine savings to 60 per cent. against the current 40 per cent. That is good and I am glad that my Front-Bench colleagues have endorsed it. I cannot envisage an alternative way of achieving that target other than to require people to have a funded state pension. That would avoid leaving many peopleindeed, an increasing proportion of peoplecontracted back into the state second pension when they could be contracted out.
	I propose that everyone in work should be required to have a pension fund of their own into which national insurance rebates would be paid that are sufficient to meet the level of pension that I have described. That rebate would mirror the structure of the present state second pension, having a strong flat-rate element that is the same for everyone, even if their income is below half the average earnings, which is probably the rough target. That element of the pension should be guaranteed by the state. If, when people retire, they find that, owing to bad investments or for any other reason, their pensions cannot be provided at target level, the Government should top them upjust as, in a defined-benefit scheme, an employer guarantees a certain pension level.
	The system that I propose would be introduced gradually. Initially everyone under 30, say, would benefit from the fund, but eventually it would apply to everyone entering the labour market.

Rob Marris: I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman's thoughtful speech. Is he aware that the system that he is describing exists in broadly the same form in Canada, under the Canada and Quebec pension plans? If so, will he tell us whether he thinks it is working there?

Peter Lilley: It would be truer to say that the system that I propose has counterparts in Australia, where everyone is now required to have a personal or occupational pension fund and is compelled to make a minimum level of provision. That has demonstrated one of the benefits of my proposed scheme. When everyone owns his or her pension, with ownership comes greater choice. It is easier for people to choose to save more. They need not go through the hassle of setting up pension funds, because they have them automatically. They can make marginal extra contributions if they wishand in Australia the level of additional voluntary contributions has doubled since everyone has had his or her own fund.

John Horam: I am interested in my right hon. Friend's proposed scheme. How would he deal with the low-paid worker who finds it difficult to save any money at all?

Peter Lilley: As under the present state second pension scheme, the low-paid worker would receive a flat-rate rebate. At present, he accrues flat-rate pension entitlement. If he earns less than half average earnings, he is treated on the assumption that that is the case. Under my scheme, he would receive a rebate on the same basisa flat-rate rebate. Even if no additional voluntary contributions were made, everyone would be able to save enough to be free of means-tested benefits; but people would find it easier to save more, and I think that many would take advantage of that.
	The third question is, how long should people be required to work before drawing a pension? If we do not adopt a scheme like the one that I propose, the Government will be able to achieve their objective of enabling 60 per cent. of pension liabilities to be met from genuine savings only by postponing retirementby reducing the amount that people pay by making them retire later. That is the only arithmetical possibility, and the Government are clearly edging, or nudging, in that direction.
	One great advantage of everyone having his or her own fund is choice. After all, this should not ultimately be an issue on which the state makes the decision. Whenever possible, the individual should be free to decide how long to work and when to retire. When people have their own funds, once those funds are sufficient to ensure that they require no additional state benefits, they should be free to retirebut once they have the funds, they will have a double incentive to work for longer. For every extra year they work, they will be able to make an extra year's contribution, or have it paid automatically into the fund if they choose. As they will have one year's less pension requirement to fund, they can look forward to a higher income in retirement.
	The present system is not fair on those with low incomes and in manual or stressful occupations, who tend to have the lowest life expectancy. The life expectancy of manual workers retiring at 65 is four years shorter than the upper quintile. Although they are paying into the system on the same basis as everyone else, they are drawing out four years' less money. At present, the annuity providers accentuate the problem, because annuities are based on the life expectancy of those who buy them and are thus geared towards the long-lived rich, who are artificially subsidised by the less long-lived and less well-off. I should like the providers to be able to produce annuities that reflect average incomes during people's working lives and that correlate with their life expectancy. It would be easier if we could provide information from the national insurance recording system computer, such as an income tax code number giving a coded overall picture of lifetime earnings. The least well-off would then be in a better position to choose what to do in retirement, and consequently to enjoy a more prosperous retirement.
	The fourth question is, how can we cut the costs of pension provisioncosts that are absorbed by administration or other measures and do not go into saving and investment to provide for the future? The stakeholder pension schemes were designed to help to achieve that by setting a cap of 1 per cent. on costs, and I hope that the Government will think carefully before relaxing that; but it has not worked, because stakeholders have not spread the costs over a greater volume of savings.
	In fact, the single most effective way of reducing the cost of providing funded pensions would be to make them compulsory. If everyone has a pension fund, there will be a larger volume of savings over which to spread the costs. More important, between half and two thirds of the costs at present are absorbed by the costs of acquiring customers. If customers are delivered on a plate, those costs will be greatly reduced, and in some cases eliminated.

Edward Davey: I hoped that the right hon. Gentleman would speak today, because he has thought long and hard about a long-term vision. But will he comment briefly on the short-term policy that we are discussing today? His policy was price indexation, while that of his hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) is earnings indexation. Will he now give us a ringing endorsement of earnings indexation?

Peter Lilley: My hon. Friend the Member for Havant correctly identified the big problem. A huge gap, which did not exist in the 1980s when we ended the earnings link, has opened between the basic state pension and the level of means-tested benefits. I propose filling that gap with compulsory funded savings, and my hon. Friend hopes to reduce it by restoring the earnings link. It must be done in one way or the other, and I think that my proposals and those of my hon. Friend are compatible, based as they are on a common analysis. I am only sorry that we heard nothing from the Liberal Democrats about what they propose to do, this being an issue in which creative thought rather than party political point scoring is needed, although, to be fair, the hon. Gentleman is less prone to party political point scoring than many of us.

Lynne Jones: The right hon. Gentleman will correct me if I am wrong, but he seemed to be saying earlier that people at the lower end of the income scale might be forced to make contributions to private pension schemes in order to retire on an income similar to that of means-tested benefits. Why should people obtain better value for money by doing that than they would obtain by contributing more to a state scheme that assured them of a decent pension in the first place?

Peter Lilley: I commend my pamphlet, which may explain what I mean more clearly. The essential point is that we compel everyone in employment to contribute to a state second pension. At present, that is done on an unfunded pay-as-you-go basis; we hope that the amount will subsequently be met from future taxation, but I should prefer it to come from savings that have accumulated through investment and to be underwritten by the taxpayer, so that the target level is a certaintythe target level being higher than the current compulsory level, which leaves people still subject to means-tested benefit. I hope that that explains the matter a little more clearly than I had evidently done up to now.
	I return briefly to the point that I was making about reducing costs. Compulsion will reduce costs. In Australia, despite the fact that I have many criticisms of the Australian system and the fact that it has not paid much attention to reducing costs, overall costs have been steadily falling and are down to the sort of level that the Government are talking about for stakeholder pensions, because of the increasing volume over which those costs are spread.
	There is one aspect to which little thought has been given as to how we can reduce the costs. After people have accumulated their pension fund, it is converted into an income for the rest of their lifean annuity or a pension income. Annuity or pension provision is a good way of pooling risks within a population with known characteristics. We know the mortality rates on average for the whole population and we can pool them. The annuity companies do that and pay out, taking that into account.
	There is no effective way of taking into account the possibility that the characteristicsthe mortality ratesof the population as a whole may change in unexpected ways in the future. The companies have all been caught out because longevity has increased more rapidly than they anticipated. They therefore have to make provision not for the best estimate of future longevity, but for conceivable but unlikely increases in life expectancy that may occur. If they do not occur, people will be paying for something that they never receive, so they will be paying too much.
	Since the greatest risk about unexpected future life expectancy is that people will live beyond, say, 85, my proposal would require that they provide themselves, through the state rebate system, with a funded pension for the first 20 years of retirement, and that, after that, the state resume paying on a pay-as-you-go basis for the over-85s at a similar rate to that guaranteed for the years prior to 85. That would mean that the state was bearing the risk of unanticipated increases in future longevity, and that it would not be borne by people who subsequently get no benefit from it.
	I believe that the proposals that I am putting before the House are compatible with those advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Havant and are based on a similar analysis. They would mean the greatest extension in wealth ownership that this country had seen since the spread of home ownership. Everyone would own a pot of money that was theirs. If they died prematurely, they could leave it to their heirs and successors. They could add to it and would have an incentive to do so. They would have a stake in the wealth-creating system because they would know that they, through their pension pot, would benefit from it. That would transform relations between people in this country and the economic system in a way that was profoundly to the country's benefit.

Sally Keeble: It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley).
	Compulsion is an interesting issue. It has often been pointed out to me that the quid pro quo of compulsion is sanctions. What happens if people do not take part in the compulsory scheme? Are they to be denied benefit when they are old? It has consistently been shown that the British public will not tolerate pensioner poverty. Pensions policy must not only tackle absolute pensioner poverty, but make sure that pensioners can lead comfortable and satisfied lives, which implies a reasonable level of income, services and so on. There has never been a satisfactory response to the question of what happens to those who do not take part in a compulsory scheme. Are we to apply sanctions when those people are at their most vulnerable? I have not read the right hon. Gentleman's leaflet, but I shall do so.
	After the Conservative party conference, two approaches became apparent. Is there to be a graduated system of state support that targets and progressively wipes out pensioner poverty and provides people with increasingly comfortable lives in their old age and good options, or is there to be a single flat-rate system, which is regressive and might give money where it is not needed? That money might be clawed back through the tax system, but such a system would put many people back into an unacceptable level of poverty.
	It is clear from the debate this afternoon that the choices are not quite so stark. It is important that we consider carefully what the Conservative Opposition spelled out. Although the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) made an immensely amusing speech, he did not tackle some of the key issues. He did so in the previous debate on the subject, and his proposals then fell into the same hole as the Conservative proposals today.
	The Conservative spokesman said that his party would continue with the pension credit for as long as it took for the flat rate to catch up. The pension credit is means-tested, and the means test or any other kind of assessment cannot be abolished as long as the pension credit is retained. That was the point raised by the hon. Member for Northavon last time. The Conservative Opposition might be offering something different, but it is not the ending of the assessment of pensioners' income and the provision of additional benefits.
	If we take 77 as the basic state pension and either 98 or 102 as the means-tested level, so to speak, and we assume an inflation rate of about 3 per cent.it could be a little more or less, depending whether it was based on prices or earningsit would take at least seven years to catch up, assuming that the means-tested levels were capped. The present system would have to continue for at least the lifetime of one Parliament. The Opposition should be honest about that when they spell out options to the public, on which they will have to decide. Decisions about pensions are critical and, as other hon. Members have pointed out, they must be kept in place for a long time because of the time span between paying in pension contributions and retirement.
	I have no doubt that the first approach, the one adopted by the Government, is the right one, with money being paid to those who need it most. We need to make sure not only that pensioners are not poornobody wants to see pensioners living in absolute povertybut that they have comfortable lives with dignity and good services. They should be able to make good choices about their quality of life not just for a couple of years after they stop working, but possibly for another 20 years or so. The only way that that can be achieved is through proper targeting.
	We all know the state of pensions in 1997. In my constituency people who had worked virtually all their adult lives were still left poor, particularly the women, mostly because they did not have the employment and contribution history to qualify for pensions, and they did not have the same occupational pensions.

Oliver Heald: The hon. Lady will have heard the Secretary of State say that in 1997 there were people managing on 68 a week. Those were people who were not claiming means-tested benefits. Today, there are people managing on 77 a week because they are not claiming means-tested benefits. Only proposals such as we are putting forward tackle that problem. The pension credit does not. According to the Government's own figures, by 2006 1.4 million pensioners will not be claiming it.

Sally Keeble: I take the point about the difficulty of getting people to claim their entitlement. I intended to deal with that. People should not be on just the basic state pension. They should have access to a range of other benefits, including the minimum income guarantee and the targeted benefits that have been described. The increase in personal tax allowances for pensioners and the introduction of a 10p starting rate in tax have certainly been important for my local pensioners, many of whom have income and employment profiles that differ from those in big city communities.
	Now we have the pension credit, too. It is completely wrong to scare people off from claiming it by likening it to means testingI agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) about that. The approach taken to assessment of income is exactly the same as that taken in respect of claiming the child tax credit, whereby every family with children gets child benefit, and its income is assessed to decide whether extra income is needed. The procedure does not take place every year, but after five years or if circumstances have substantially changedfor example, if people get married, which is fairly straightforward to declare.
	The working of the pension credit introduces important changes that take into account the consultations that took place on the proposals. I had such a consultation session in my constituency, where pensioners expressed concerns that have since been addressed. For example, they wanted to keep their nest eggs, which are mostly not huge amounts of more than 10,000, but around 5,000. They do not want that money to be touched by any kind of means-testing, because they want it to pay for their funerals. The assessment considers factors such as income from savings and it can be done on the phone, which is important. I particularly congratulate the Pension Service on its outreach work. I have run street stalls with the Pension Service and Age Concern. Of course, some people will have criticisms, but we are encouraging pensioners to apply for the benefit and making it easier for them to ensure that they can get the extra money to which they are entitled. Take-up in the Northampton area has been quite good, which has a lot to do with the innovative work of the Pension Service.
	I accept that there is more to do to ensure that people can enjoy the living standards and life chances in retirement that we would all want for ourselves. We need to tackle a range of issues such as annuities and the problems of occupational pension schemes, as well as council tax and house rentals, about which large numbers of pensioners complain. I am particularly concerned about pensioners' housing. We should support schemes similar to an equity release scheme to enable them to realise some of the value of their property in order to carry out home improvements and thus to live in their own homes in comfort for a longer period. It is also important to ensure that people are not ripped off by home income plans and equity release schemes, which represent a growing sector of the market.
	The flat-rate approach is an illusion, because any flat rate that the country could afford to apply across the board would not be enough for people who rely solely on this benefit to live on. It will always be necessary to have the option of increasing income over and above the flat rate level. Any system that is to provide an enhanced income will have to include measures to allow for its proper assessment. Otherwise, it becomes completely insupportable in tax terms; and I have no doubt that my constituents would be the first to complain in the event of large tax increases.

Lynne Jones: Has my hon. Friend studied the proposals by the Institute for Public Policy Research suggesting that the basic state pension could be set at the same level as the means-tested pension credit if the state second pension were to be done away with; and that it could be done over 30 years if the retirement age increased to 67? In that context, it is not correct to say that it is impossible to set a reasonable level of basic state pension without substantially increasing taxes.

Sally Keeble: I shall look carefully at that publication. My hon. Friend mentioned a progressive increase in the retirement age over 30 years, but we need to consider the matter over a shorter term than that. I do not see how one can get from 77 a week to 98 or 102 a week in a few years without a very big tax increase, which will not be supported. Moreover, most people would recognise that taxpayers' money has to be spent in the most cost-effective mannerthat is, where it is most needed. There is no way round that, unless, as the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden suggested, one develops a system that makes it possible to feed money in at the savings end to get the equation right in terms of support for pension schemes. I fail to see how one can have a flat rate that is comfortable without having a very big tax increase. Furthermore, in any flat-rate system the pensioners who would be most likely to miss out are women, who often have the most interrupted employment patterns, the most difficulty in making up contributions, lower earnings and longer life expectancy. We have to be careful about holding out a flat-rate approach as a panacea.
	We should consider how much pensioners' expectations have changed in terms of making choices. The speech from the Conservative Front Bench was completely opportunistic and targeted at getting the so-called grey vote. People should remember which party gave them the pensions mis-selling scandalpeople paying into a Government-sponsored, Government-advertised scheme that sold them down the riverand the botched handling of the abolition of the widows' state earnings-related pension scheme.

Peter Duncan: Would the hon. Lady care to remind the House which party has given people a 5 billion per year tax grab on pensions?

Sally Keeble: I just say this: which party gave this country the most stable economic management, with the lowest unemployment and lowest inflation, that I can remember in my lifetime? It was this party. The sound working of the economy is the underpinning of any pensions policy. That is why, painful as it was, the decision on tax credits was right.
	Who gave us cold weather payments? We should remember the lack of dignity involved in trying to get benefits at the time when if the temperature went below a certain level for four nights one could claim 5. As a councillor, I ran around in the snow with claims forms so that bitterly cold pensioners could claim 5; now, they automatically get 200 as of right.
	I also remember who introduced the eye tests. Let us think back to the time when only the pensioners who lived in Labour areas got bus passes; now all pensioners have them as of right because they have a Labour Government.
	Women will remember how, if they were lone parents, they used not to be able to get out to work because they did not have help with child care costs or nursery provision, and they did not get the support that they now receive through the new deal for lone parents, which is one thing that the Conservatives have said they would scrap. Having been unable to get out to work, those women then copped it by not having proper pension provision or carer's allowance for their old age. I hope that people will remember what happened before and think about how things have now changed. Pensioners can now be warm enough in winter, and women can go out to work and have a proper pension entitlement.
	We all recognise that life is not perfect, but I hope that people will realise that this Government's carefully worked out approach to pensions is on the right trackeven though everything is not perfect yetand that there has been a quantum leap in the living standards of older people in this country.

Peter Duncan: Yet again, it is an Opposition day debate that provides us with the opportunity to discuss the pensions crisis in the United Kingdom. The hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) talked about the carefully crafted approach to pensions, but I came across some extraordinary figures yesterday that referred to the liabilities in Government pension funds. They showed that, whereas in 1997 the liability figure was 290 billion, it is now estimated by Merceran independent consultancy firmto have exceeded 600 billion. In the last year alone, it has gone up by 110 billion. Is it any wonder that we are debatingin Opposition timea pensions system that is in crisis?
	There was a regrettably long delay last year before the appointment of a Pensions Minister, and this year we have seen a tax grab of another 5 billion. I think that the cash register is now ringing up a figure of 35 billion taken from the nation's pensions. Is it any wonder that the system is in crisis? We have no debates on this issue in Government time because, irrespective of what the hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) saysI regret that he is no longer in his placethe Government do not want to talk about pensions because they know that there is a crisis in the system.

John Robertson: May I inform the hon. Gentleman that the reason that my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) is not here at the moment is that he is in the European Scrutiny Committee? My hon. Friend said earlier that the Conservative party had done absolutely nothing to help the poor; perhaps the hon. Gentleman can tell the House what he would do in that regard.

Peter Duncan: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. I shall come to that matter in a second, and I shall be delighted to have the opportunity to do so.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) rightly pointed out the spiralling system of lower-funded schemes and increasing means-testing. In 1998, the Green Paper stated that the Government wanted that situation to be reversed. Has the policy changed, or has it just failed? I hope that, if nothing else, the Minister will provide an answer to that question when he responds to the debate.
	As a constituency MP, I am aware that 60 per cent. of the pensioners who are not claiming means-tested benefits are among the poorest fifth of pensioners. My constituency is very rural and isolated, and a significant problem is that many of those who live in rural areas are simply excluded from the most complex and detailed of benefit systems. I am engaged in a regular dialogue with the Dumfries and Galloway elderly forum, which I am happy to recognise as the pensioners' voice in south-west Scotland. It is an active organisation that gives politicians a hard time. It is not party political; it gives politicians on all sides of the fence a hard time, and I am delighted to recognise the role that it plays in doing so.
	The forum's members are powerful advocates for all pensioners, and particularly for the poor. They would recognise that, as the Pensions Policy Institute has pointed out, the income of the bottom fifth of pensioners in 1979 was 23 per cent. of average earnings, yet by 2001 this figure had fallen to just 21 per cent. The poorest pensioners are getting poorer. Pensioners recognise that, I recognise that, and I hope that, if nothing else, this debate will give us the opportunity to provide a pointer towards a way of reversing that trend.
	Pensioners have welcomed the proposal elaborated at our party conference last week to restore the earnings link. They remind me constantly that that is the one item that they wanted to see: a simple restoration of the link that would give a benefit to each and every pensioner up each and every farm track, including those who do not have access to the telephone and free phone lines. Each and every pensioner should be able to get an earnings-linked pension, and I am delighted that my Front-Bench colleagues have proposed such an innovative scheme. Our proposal is supported by all pensioners' groups. Help the Aged has welcomed our
	commitment to lift pensioners off a dependence on means-tested benefits. The pledge to link pensions to average earnings will allow older people to share in the rewards of growing national wealth.
	I, too, welcome the proposal, and I hope that it will reach fruition when we see a Conservative Government within the next two years.
	Means-testing is part of the problem, not part of the solution. In 1993, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the Chancellor, said:
	I want the next Labour Government to achieve what in 50 years of the Welfare State has never been achieved. The end of the means test for our elderly people.
	He understood the problem; he saw that means-testing was part of the problem and not the solution in terms of providing dignity for people in their old age. Yet, since then, we have seen an extension of means-testing. I accept the genuine approach of the hon. Member for Northampton, North to the question, but the fact is that, if the pension credit looks like a means test, breathes like a means test and walks like a means test, it is a means test. Pensioners know that. When this Government took office, 40 per cent. of pensioners were dependent on means-tested benefits; that figure has now reached more than 60 per cent. and is heading for 75 per cent.

Sally Keeble: The hon. Gentleman said that he was in favour of restoring the link to earnings. Would that include the catch-up for what has been lost? What level does he envisage for the pension? A figure of 84 has been floated.

Peter Duncan: I shall try to put this as simply as possible. Pensioners' groups throughout the UK will welcome the fact that the next Conservative Government will restore the annual link between the old age pension and average earnings.
	The trend towards greater means-testing is wrong and is taking away people's dignity in retirement. The hon. Member for Hamilton, Southwho I understand is now in Committeepainted a moving picture of life in a tenement where means-testing had a stigma attached. I understand that, and to many people, there is still a stigma attached to lifting the phone and having to go into great detail about their life savings. That does not provide them with any dignity. An increasing proportion of our pensioners have to go cap in hand to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to find dignity in their retirement, and I believe that that is wrong.
	The pension credit was lauded by the Government as their great solution, but the simple fact is that 1 million households will be excluded from it after three years. Even on the Government's own figures, some 1.4 million pensioners will not be getting the money to which they are entitled. I do not want Labour Members to suggest that I am talking down the pension credit. I am always accused, when discussing Scottish issues, of talking down Scotland. I am talking down neither Scotland nor the pension credit. I want every single person in my constituency who is entitled to this credit to get it, but the Government's own figures tell us that it will not reach every person who is entitled to it.
	I was particularly impressed by the evidence in the report of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, which the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns) will know intimately. It states that the pension credit
	does significantly increase the number of pensioners who fall within that means test.
	I find it surprising that the hon. Gentleman suggested in a sedentary intervention that MPs say, That's what we're paid for, when dealing with increased inquiries to expand the use of the pension credit. It is the Government's role to provide benefits to those entitled to them. I was astonished by the amount of time it took my office to sort out the chaos in the child tax credit a few months ago. I was willing to do that because it is part of my role, but it should not have been necessary. It was chaos of the Government's making and it is shameful that they have continued to preside over a system that does not provide benefits to those entitled to them.
	There is a growing perception, and reality, that looking after oneself is not worthwhile. I was shocked last week to be described for the first time as old; I am only 38. I read that I was at the end of the baby boom generation, born between 1945 and 1965, who are now becoming old and having to look after themselves. Where is the incentive for people of my generation to start looking after ourselves?
	Figures provided by Mercer, the independent consultants, show that a pension fund of 180,000 is required for a married couple before they are better off. If that is not the case, the Government must deny it. That is our understanding. It is a shocking figure and an indictment of how means-testing has so permeated the system. Means-testing takes away all incentive to look after oneself, not least by the ridiculous 10 per cent. assumed rate on savings beyond 6,000, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Havant said, is an appalling travesty of reality.
	The pensions crisis will never be resolved until we reverse the trend towards greater means-testing and go back to a system whereby it is in people's own interests to start looking forward to their old age and the opportunities that it provides, and until we provide dignity in what is surely one of the most attractive phases of life.

Lynne Jones: There is no doubt that the Government have substantially increased the incomes of many of our poorest pensioners. Many are better off than they have ever been in their lives. Certainly that is what my mother told me; she is looking forward to receiving about 10 a week pension credit because she receives a small occupational pension as a result of 25 years of working and paying into a scheme.
	My problem is that even at 102 a week the pension credit still does not provide a high standard of living. Age Concern says that a modest but adequate income for today's pensioners would be about 130 a week. The other concern is the disincentives built into the system as a result of the universal benefitthe basic state pensionbeing set at nearly 25 a week below the means-tested benefit. Under Labour's proposals, the pension credit would be set to increase over the next four years to about 122 a weekmaking various assumptions about rises in earningswhereas the basic state pension would be expected to rise from 77.45 to 85.55 a week. The gap between those two pensioner benefits would continue to increase.
	The Tories have proclaimed that they have suddenly seen the light and decided that they want to restore the link to earnings. That is not what they are proposing. Their concern, and I agree, is that there is too big a gapI do not think there should be a gap at allbetween the basic state pension and the means-tested benefit, and they want to reduce the gap. Over four years, they would do that by restoring the link to earnings; that is a four-year commitment.
	Under the Tory proposals, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the basic state pension, instead of being 85.55 as under Labour's proposals, would be 92.40. In order to bridge the gap between the pension and the means-tested benefit, about which the Tories are rightly concerned, they would thus slightly boost the level of the basic state pension but hold down increases in the means-tested benefit. Under the Tory proposals, if the means-tested benefit were linked only to earnings, it would be 10 a week below Labour's proposals. In other words, the Tory proposals reduce the maximum help that would be available to the poorest pensioners. It will not be acceptable in 2009 if the means-tested pension is a mere 112.70 a week, in today's figures.
	It is dishonest of the Tories to suggest that they would restore the link. They want, rightly, to reduce means testing; in that, I agree with them entirely. But we must also ensure that we tackle pensioner poverty, and the Tories have not come up with proposals to deal with that.
	A person in their twenties planning for retirement will have to bear it in mind that when they retire in 40 years' time, there will be 40 per cent. more pensioners. The Government's plan is that we should spend no more than 5 per cent. of GDP on state pensionsthe current level. Clearly, if there are to be 40 per cent. more pensioners, that is an unrealistically low and socially unacceptable level at which to aim.
	It might be possible to have a massive increase in private saving, but under the current arrangements with means-testing, that seems unlikely to be the case. My concern is about younger people who are trying to make an informed choice about saving for retirement, something the Government say they should be able to do. Unfortunately, the complexity of the current system makes it impossible for them to work out what they can expect from the state when they retire in up to 40 years' time. People doubt that the state will commit to paying a decent basic pension, particularly those who, unlike Members of Parliament, are not fortunate in having reasonably high salaries and good pension schemes. People on low incomes cannot see the point of saving for pensions, hence we see the crisis in the private pensions system, fuelled by an inadequate state system.
	If we want to alleviate pensioner poverty, we have to save more for our pensions. The question is how that should be done and what the combination of state and private contribution should be. For the last 20 years, the financial services industry has tried to persuade opinion formers that state provision is failing and that the Government should privatise the process. Clearly that is what the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) believes.
	The financial services scandals have proved that markets cannot provide the level of security needed by people on low incomes if they are to be persuaded to put their money into retirement savings. We must decide what gives us the best value for money; whether it is putting money into a state pension through national insurance or taxation, or whether it is through private investment. The only way in which there will be a better return if money is put through private investment is if that increases growth in GDP above that which would have been the case had the state invested the money. There is nothing to indicate that that is the case. People now realise that the stock market is not a secure place for people on low incomes to invest their savings. In talking about compulsion, we need to guard against potential future accusations that the state forced people to contribute to a pension that did not give a decent return on their investment. If they are not careful, those who advocate compulsion could be accused in future of mis-selling.
	If we are to have a sustainable pensions policy, people of all political persuasions must come together to create it. I welcome the Conservatives' commitment to the establishment of the means-tested benefit at the same level, hopefully, as the basic state pension. That would surely provide a foundation for people to plan for the future. I do not believe, however, that in being committed to that, they are also committed to ensuring that pensioners are kept out of poverty. If that really is their aspiration, they would have to ensure that the basic pension is set at a decent level. There are plenty of arguments for spending more, in terms of contributing to a state pension. The Pensions Policy Institute said that bringing the basic state pension up to the same level as the means-tested benefit would cost 0.5 per cent. of gross domestic product. This Government should aim for that over time, because it would then be possible to phase out the pension credit. That would also provide a real incentive for younger people, in that they could keep for themselves everything that they saved above the state provision.
	I am an unreconstructed believer in universal benefits, coupled with a progressive taxation system through which people such as mewho benefit from child benefit or, eventually, a basic state pensionpay higher taxes if they have a sufficiently high income. That is a simple, affordable system that people can understand. Organisations such as the Institute for Public Policy Research and an increasing number of people in the pensions industry are saying that, to encourage private saving and to save taxpayers' money and spending on future means-tested benefits, we must set the basic state pension at a decent level.
	We need to start talking about how we can simplify the system. If the Government really want people to make informed choices, they must tackle the interrelationship between basic state provision and private provision. I urge my hon. Friends to extend the remit of the pension commission, so that it can examine this important issue.
	I shall examine the proposals of the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, but it appears that they have nothing additional to offer today's pensioners or future pensioners, when compared with the Government's state second pension. Of course, if we were to do away with contracting-out provision and examine how we spend tax relief for private provision, we could release some 17 billion. That money would be much better spent on ensuring that the basic state pension is set at a decent level, and on giving greater incentives to people on lower incomes to save privately, or in other ways. For example, Richard Murphy, Colin Hines and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) have come up with an interesting proposal in a pamphlet entitled People's Pensions, which is about investing in Government bonds. I remind Members that in the 1960s, 50 per cent. of pension fund assets were invested in Government bonds; now, only 6 or 7 per cent. are so invested. So there are ways other than equitiesinvesting in equities is a highly risky businessin which people can invest money, over and above what the state provides. I encourage people to look at such provisions.
	We have to do more to ensure that people on low incomes can rely on the state, and on the fact that anything that they save will be available to them when they retire, rather than being clawed back through means-tested benefit. That is the real flaw in the Government's policy, even more so than the question of stigma. The Government are not making clear to younger people what the state will provide for them when they retire. That is a crucial flaw, and I urge the Government to rectify it.

Hywel Williams: I shall be brief as I appreciate that time is rather short. I must confess that this debate has a slight feeling of unreality, given the free transfer of policies that we have witnessed between Government and Opposition Front Benchers. As that great philosopher Yogi Bear might have said, It looks like yet another case of dj vu, Boo Boo. The party that broke the link between pensions and benefits and earningsalbeit under different circumstancesis now advocating the re-establishment of that link and a return to universalism. And the party that condemned the breaking of that linkto its credit, it established it when in government, between 1974 and 1979is now arguing contrariwise.
	Many good people in the Labour party who are my friendssome of them are even in the Labour party in Walesdespair at the Government's determination to extend income testing even further. These are the people alongside whom I worked to ensure that child benefit was retained and, indeed, improved as a universal flat-rate benefit. They are the same Labour people who argue, rightly, that applying the income test guarantees that some peopleoften the poorest, who should be receiving additional benefitswill not claim, for a variety of reasons. Those people are guaranteed to lose out in the very long term.
	They are also the Labour party people who realise that applying the income test on an ever-increasing scale will inevitably lead to ever-increasing complexity, which has been a theme of today's debate. The Government might say that their new income test is not like previous tests, and I am sure that there is an element of truth in that assertion. But in the end, we cannot buck the fundamentals. If the payment of benefit is contingent on an individual assessment, that assessment has to be carried out. Even the simplest and most infrequent of individual assessments will inevitably lead to more complexity and more scope for mistakes, and to disincentive effects on claiming and saving. We know that, in reality, those assessments will not apply for five years, because people will have to report changes much more often. I wish that I shared the confidence of the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), who said that reporting the changes would be straightforward and unproblematic. It might be unproblematic for Members, but not to older people in my constituency and throughout Wales.
	I want briefly to draw attention to some of the problems experienced at the Swansea pension centrethe only pension centre in Wales. It is our national pension centre and its problems are a national issue in Wales. It has proved a problem to get through to workers dedicated to particular cases, rather than to a different person every time that people phone. Indeed, people certainly experience a problem in accessing the telephone lines. I look to the Minister for an assuranceperhaps in a letterthat the workers who staff the telephone lines, and particularly the Welsh language telephone line, will be suitably trained and qualified. They should be directly employed by the pensions centre and not, as people suspect, agency workers.
	I have to say that the experience of my constituents is not good, certainly in respect of the computer system. Members will be interested to know that this morning I phoned the new directory inquiries companies to ask for the pension line number. One company had no idea what I was talking about, so I phoned a competitor company, which was equally baffled. So much for the privatisation of the old 192 system. Pensioners in my constituency who are looking for the number will be equally baffled.
	Reference has been made to home visits. Local pension clinics are certainly held in my constituency and their work is valuable, but they are run fortnightly and there is a question about what counts as local. I shall provide one example for people who are familiar with the geography of north-west Wales. A clinic is held in Porthmadog, which my constituents might be able to attend, but, unfortunately, it is about 30 miles away and public transport is not what one would like.
	We know that pensioner poverty is not evenly spread; it is much worse in northern England, Scotland and Wales. Such regional problems are real. Will the Minister give an assurance, again by a letter, that the Government have targets for take-up in the appropriate regions of England, Scotland and Wales? What are those targets and what is the time scale for their achievement?
	The pension protection plan, which has already been discussed, is welcome. However, Plaid Cymru Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for East Carmarthen and Dinefwr (Adam Price), highlighted the scandal at ASW months ago. The Secretary of State for Wales said that the then proposed protection was a gimmick. I am glad to see that that gimmick has now crossed the Floor from these Benches to the Government Front Bench.
	Another issue is the extension of the right to work up to the age of 70. Members on both sides of the House are concerned about extending employment protection to those working longer into their lifespan. The right to sue for unfair dismissal is essential and should be in place now rather than in 2006, if it comes at all.
	I should like to finish with a couple of points that apply particularly to Wales and to some of the ways of solving the conundrum posed earlier by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones)how to pay for it all. My party's policies on regional economic matters and national Welsh economic matters come into play. The inactivity of large parts of the work force over the age of 50 is an important factor, and such economic inactivity is much worse in Wales, Scotland and some English regions than in the south-east of England. On some calculations, if the rate of economic activity were raised in those regions, it would provide sufficient tax take and national insurance contribution to pay for a much better pension. I am no mathematician and I am not sure that that income would be enough, but I certainly commend that way of dealing with the problem. Finally, my party believes that greater means-testing will play badly in Wales, particularly among poorer people. It is not the way to proceed.

John Robertson: I was interested in the contribution from the hon. Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) or, as he is known in Scotland, the Tory one. I feel that he is a friend, but a misguided one. I have been surprised by the crocodile tears of the Conservatives. Those tears are a ruse: they do not care one jot about means-testing and that has been shown over many years. Nor do they care one jot about the poorest in society. It is political point scoring at its worst and it is done without any thought of or consideration for the people who they are using to make those points.
	I represent Glasgow, Anniesland, and we have some 13,500 pensioner households on a conservativewith a small cestimate, or about 18,000 over-60s. The pension credit appears to be working well. The complaints that we have heard today about the telephone lines are not matched in the Anniesland area. The only problems that we have relate to paperwork and letters received. I have talked to the pension people and, apparently, the letters are written by a computer. They are formulated according to the answers given on the forms. However, that is not the way to do it when dealing with real people, especially the elderly. I ask the Minister to look at the problemI have mentioned it to him beforeso that people receive letters that they can understand. More importantly, MPs should be able to understand themit has taken me a few readings to work some of them out. I have some knowledge of what has happened with the pension credit, however, and I pay tribute to the people manning the telephone lines for the good work that they are doing.
	We should remember what the Government have done and people should realise what could be lost if the Conservatives were to come to power. My pensioner households receive 200 every winter as their winter fuel allowance, not the measly 5 that was mentioned earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), who talked about running all over her constituency trying to hand out forms. The 200 is given to every pensioner household every year and I am glad to say that after my prompting and prodding the Chancellor put it up to that amount. I take personal credit for that.

Peter Duncan: Are any of the pensioner households that the hon. Gentleman mentions paying more council tax? Is that increase greater than the 200 that he mentions?

John Robertson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. The sad fact is that many pensioner households in Anniesland do not pay council tax, because they are so far down the economic ladder. However, for those who do pay it, the council in Glasgow has kept it fairly level over the past four or five years and it has actually gone down in real terms. I thank him for that question because I am sure that it has added a couple more votes to my majority.
	The Government have not and should not apologise for means-testing. It was not introduced by this Government, but it is necessary if we are to find out who are the poorest in society. The number of people we have taken care of holds up against any Government in the past and, I hazard a guess, in the future as well. The Government should be commended for their work on pensions. It is important that we look after those who need to be looked after the most. Anybody who suggests otherwise is talking through a hole in their head.

Rob Marris: Other than their mouth.

John Robertson: Exactly. The across-the-board increases mentioned by the Opposition sound very nice, butas was clear from their speechesthey are trying to help only the top 10 per cent. The Opposition do not care about 60 per cent. of the population. Why not? Because that 60 per cent. do not vote for them. If that 60 per cent. voted for them, they would start to care about them. As it is, the Conservatives are happy to throw that 60 per cent. in a dustbin.
	I am aware of the time and I shall be interested to hear what the Opposition spokesman has to say, but I have one further comment about the 18 years of misrule during which the Tories did little for pensioners. We have known for decades that there is a pension problem. It is not confined to the UK, but affects the rest of the world, especially those countries in the western hemisphere that do rather well in financial terms.
	We do not need to take lessons about pensions from the Opposition. The Conservative Government created 4 million unemployed. Where were the pensions of the long-term unemployed? I congratulate the Government on what they have done, and want them to do an awful lot more. I wanted to say a word about final-salary pensions, but that will have to wait for another day.

Oliver Heald: We have had an excellent debate this afternoon. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson) got a little overheated, but even he made some excellent points about the need for everyone involved to take a serious look at this issue. Early in his remarks, he made the point that there must be means-testing if we are to find out who are the poorest pensioners. That contrasted with the comment made just before by the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams), who said that it is the poorest pensioners who will not and do not claim under the means test.
	A range of excellent speeches were made by Back-Bench Members. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) made a distinguished contribution, to which I shall return. My hon. Friend the Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) did not deserve the somewhat uncharitable comments from the hon. Member for Glasgow, Anniesland, as he made an excellent speech too. Hon. Members of all parties recognise, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) noted, that reform is needed. We must improve the situation with the state pension scheme in particular if we are to tackle the problems that the country faces.
	Before this Labour Government came to power, Labour Members were deeply concerned about means-testing. I remember well a document published in 1996 entitled Getting Welfare to Work, in which the Labour party made the point that means-tested benefits at that time were claimed by 3.5 million people over state retirement age. It complained that 600,000 were not receiving the income support to which they were entitled, and said that they were among the poorest people in Britain. In fact, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer called at that time for an end to the means test, and spoke about the massive increase in inequality among pensioners. He made the point that the poorest pensioners were those who did not claim.
	In this debate, we have heard the comments made by the hon. Members for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) and for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden and by my hon. Friend the Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale. They all noted that we parliamentarians will have to work hard to encourage people to take up the benefits to which they are entitled, and of course they are right.
	When I was a junior Minister, we used to have take-up campaigns with Age Concern. We used to push hard for take-up. The current Government have made a real effort in that regard, but it has not worked. That is what has led the Opposition to review our policies.
	Labour made bold statements in opposition, but the income of the bottom fifth of pensioners, as a percentage of national average earnings, is now lower than in 1979. Stakeholder pensions were supposed to be the solution for those earning between 9,000 and 20,000 a year. The information company Datamonitor has said that that policy was simply cannibalising existing retirement provision, and noted that almost everyone joining the schemes was simply changing within the system, rather than being a new applicant. Ninety per cent. of the company schemes set up for stakeholder pensions have no money in them. Pension credits have been introduced, and they have spread means-testing to more than 50 per cent. of the population.
	The Government's ambition means that in 2006that is, in three years' time1.4 million of the poorest pensioners will still be missing out on the benefits to which they are entitled. And the Government say that they are targeting help on the poorest pensioners. It is nonsense.
	The modelling assumes that every poor pensioner will claim the benefits to which he is entitledthe Secretary of State is always saying that, but he is defying the experience of Ministers and individuals who have been concerned about the problem for the past 10 years. We have seen what happens; it does not work. One has only to read the comments of people such as Gordon Lishman, who heads Age Concern, to realise that. He says that there is further evidence that money is not getting to the poorest older people and that hundreds of thousands of older people who are eligible for the minimum income guarantee do not claim because they are put off by the stigma or because they do not understand their pension rights. He has explained all the difficulties.
	It is not enough to suggest, as some hon. Members have, that if one calls the means test something else, one gets rid of that stigma. That is not what is happening. Let us look at the latest figures, six months into the pension credit. Of course, there are the 1.8 million households that were transferred automatically to the new system, but only 100,000 further households have been processed in six months, which is fewer than 200,000 individuals. The case load is 3.1 million. How long will those people have to wait for the money that the Government have already committed themselves to? They say that those people are entitled to the money, but it will take years even to reach the point where 1.5 million people get it. It is a failed system.
	The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak has been involved in these issues for years. She and others who spoke in the debate, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden and, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) in his opening speech, pointed out that there is a massive disincentive to save if we have means-tested benefits so high up the income scale. The approach is misplaced. Even the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) pointed out that the current arrangement is damaging retirement income because it is such a disincentive to save. Under this Government the savings ratio is half what it was under the Conservatives.
	What has happened to funded pensions? My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden described them as being in meltdown and other hon. Members have described the situation as disastrous. Why did that happen? There was the 5 billion a year pensions taxthe ending of dividend tax creditsand the erosion of the basic protection provided by the minimum funding requirement, which the Government twice deliberately eroded. They slashed it. There were the contracted out rebates, which have not kept pace with the actuarial value of the rights for which they are supposed to paya further 1.5 billion pension tax imposed by this Government. Then, we are supposed to be surprisedthey say that it is due to the economic conditionswhen only 19 per cent. of final salary schemes are now open to new members. What will that do to the future livelihoods of our people? For the first time in generations, workers will expect a worse income in retirement than their predecessors.
	Twenty-six organisations have called for state pension reform. The Conservative party has looked into that and come up with proposals that are costed, hold water and will improve the situation. People throughout the country are despairing about the fact that this Government will not even consider reformeven members of the Labour party in Wales are despairing of that fact, as the hon. Member for Caernarfon said.
	All that the Government have come up with are proposals designed to limit the damage that they have done: proposals for protection schemes, for example. One can cautiously welcome such proposals, but what about creating incentives to save? As my right hon. Friend and most other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate have acknowledged, savings are what will give people the pensions that they need. Until we have a system that gives pension schemes, employers and individuals some scrap of incentive to save, we will not solve the problem.
	I have a lot of sympathy with the point made by the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) about the winding-up victims. I have met them and marched with them. We have held debates in the House about them. We supported the Second Reading of the Bill promoted by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, but blocked by the Government time after time after time.
	The Government promised so much. They promised less means-testing, but we got more; more equality, but we got less; better take-up, but we got worse take-up. They promised a move towards more saving and funded provision compared with state benefits, but we got less. Some people say that less is more and perhaps in the language of new Labourthe language of spinthat is the case, but the truth is that this is the failed record of a failed Government. They live in such an unreal world that they believe that failure is the new success. New Labourbest at its boldest. Bold as brassbrass neck!

Hon. Members: Follow that.

Malcolm Wicks: Follow that indeed. I was about to say that we had heard a fine debate with thoughtful speeches, but it went off a bit towards the end. I had not realised that I was following a marcher and a demonstrator. I can imagine the chant, What do we want? Tory leadership. When do we want it? Now.
	The debate has been useful. The Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb), made a significant speech that I much enjoyed. I did not agree with all of it but it was an important speech. I heard recently that the Liberal Democrat leader had shuffled away all the lefties. I have never seen a leftie on the Liberal Democrat Benches, but it is good to see that the hon. Gentleman is still in his place in the senior common room.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the concerns of the shadow Secretary of State about the nation's fertility but I shall not follow him down that path. We do not want the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) to be referred to as two brains and three or more babies.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) made an important speech in which he contrasted the mean-minded means-testing of yesteryear, drawing on his family's past and experience, with the approach to pension credit today[Interruption.] I hope that people will read his speech, including the laughers who were not in the Chamber during the debate, and that, whatever their concerns about income testing, they will at least understand the significant points that he made. It was a moving speech.
	The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley), a former Secretary of State, made an important speech about occupational pensions. He modestly advertised his new Social Market Foundation pamphlet. I already have a copy, but I imagine that others might wait for the January sales to get a better bargain. He presented his proposals with great care and research and I enjoyed his speech.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) talked about policy objectives and the importance of ensuring not only the relief of poverty but also comfort and dignity in old age. I commend her efforts in Northampton in boosting pension credit; such action is important.
	The hon. Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) referred to issues in his rural constituency. I should like to talk to him more about that so that we can ensure that our local Pension Service, which is doing a good job across Great Britain, can be of greater significance in his constituency in respect of the location of advice surgeries. I shall be happy to talk to him about that.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) outlined her concerns, which are well known. I appreciate her points although I do not agree with them. She was in some difficulty; I thought that I heard a tremor in her voice when she said that she agreed with the Conservatives' new approach to the earnings link. However, as the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden praised the Australian Labour Government's approach to pensions, it has probably just been one of those interesting afternoons.
	The hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) expressed some concerns about the Pension Service in Wales. I should like to talk to you seriously about those. I think that the service is doing a good job there, but if there are concerns I want to look into them and I should appreciate your advice.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson), among other things, paid tribute to our Pension Service.

Adrian Flook: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Malcolm Wicks: May I make some progress? I will give way if you catch my eye again.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. May I remind the hon. Gentleman that he should be speaking in the third person? I let it go to start with but he seems to have got into a groove.

Malcolm Wicks: I am so carried away by the debate on pensions, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	We have touched on a range of issues about the state's responsibilities for pensions. Of course, those important responsibilities include establishing a reasonable basic pension and related rights; tackling poverty, which I want to come on to; increasing access to second and earnings-related state pensions; promoting confidence and trust in pensions, which has been a theme today; and informing and educating the public, particularly younger people, about pension choices and the importance of pension forecasts.
	Finally, the responsibilities include enabling the development of flexible work and retirement patterns so that we can promote work among the over-50s, abolish age discrimination, promote favourable financial arrangements for those who defer the state pensionmy right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has introduced proposalsand, of course, allow older people to draw their pension and continue employment at the same time.
	On the central issue todaypension creditI urge right hon. and hon. Members to be careful about how we discuss such issues. It is important to have a debate and there are differences between us, but if we use words such as stigma in relation to claiming pension credit, I am afraid that we may achieve the result that we all do not want to achieve.

Adrian Flook: In the Minister's tribute to all those who have contributed to the debatesadly, although I have been sitting here, I was unable to do sohe has still not mentioned the word, means-testing. Given that mean-testing has increased dramatically under this Government, can he explain how my generation can be encouraged to save for the future?

Malcolm Wicks: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman missed the debate. No doubt he will catch up by reading Hansard. The point that I am trying to make is that, if we talk about stigma, we will put off frail and vulnerable people from applying for their rights to pension credit.
	Let me quote from The Times of 10 October. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State quoted the Daily Mail; I want to go up market and quote from The Times, where someone writes:
	I fail to understand why the current pensions regime should attract so much criticism. As someone who has recently dealt with the pension service on behalf of an elderly relative, I can say that the process of applying for pension credit was extremely straightforward, with the form being almost fully completed over the phone.

Oliver Heald: rose

Malcolm Wicks: No doubt, the hon. Gentleman wants to talk about stigma again.

Oliver Heald: Does the hon. Gentleman think it wrong for the director general of Age Concern, who helps the Minister to run his campaign on take-up, to refer to stigma? The quotation came not from me, but from the director general of Age Concern.

Malcolm Wicks: Yes, I think that the director general is wrong. That is the short answer to that question.
	We have had much success on pension credit. All those on the minimum income guarantee have been successfully transferred to pension credit. We have written to 1.6 million households, and 1.1 million households have already gained extra money as a result of pension credit. It is heartening to hear many of the success stories about people ending up with 86 more a weeknot only from pension credit, but from other benefits, such as housing benefitand, in another case, in Essex, with 35 more a week.
	The Tory proposal to return to the earnings link is far-fetched, given that a Conservative Government abolished it back in 1980. If this goes on, we will soon see the shadow Home Secretary visit a comprehensive school just to show that he understands such things and, no doubt, he will talk to the lads and lasses about whether they prefer fox hunting or fives as a sport.

Gregory Barker: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Malcolm Wicks: I have not got time.
	I am afraid that, if the Conservatives were ever to implement their policies, it would be bad news for women, who should be major gainers, and the very group who would not receive any help would be the very poor. Let me quote what the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer said on the Dimbleby programme on 5 October. He said:
	Those who are entitled to the pension credit and do claim . . . will not be better off
	under Conservative proposals. There we have it. If the Conservatives abolished the state second pension, carers would be no better off either.
	The fact of the matter is that, whatever the Conservative party says today, people contrast the Conservative Government's record, when nothing was done for the poorest, with the policies of this Labour Government who, as well as bolstering the basic state pension, have helped the poorest, with the pension credit, free television licences for the over-75s, the winter fuel payments and re-establishing the eye tests that the Conservatives abolished.
	That is our record. We will debate it, put it to the British people, and compare it not with the promises of the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions but with the record of the previous Conservative Government. I hope that everyone will go out and argue for the pension credit and ensure that those people in our communities and constituencies who most deserve pension credit receive it. Our take-up target is 100 per cent. We want everyone to get it. There will be those who sneer, but we will do our best to ensure that everyone who deserves pension credit will receive it.
	Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:
	The House proceeded to a Division.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.

The House having divided: Ayes 200, Noes 331.

Question accordingly negatived.
	Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	Resolved,
	That this House welcomes the fact that people are living longer than ever before; welcomes Government action to tackle pensioner poverty and to promote retirement flexibility, occupational pension security and informed choice; condemns the inheritance of 1997, with millions of pensioners in poverty, many being expected by the Government to live on under 68 a week, and the legacy of pension mis-selling; endorses the Work and Pensions Committee's judgement that current policies have been successful in reducing pensioner poverty; notes that the Government is spending 9 billion extra per year in real terms on pensioners compared with the 1997 system; further notes that this is 5.7 billion more than if the basic pension had been linked to earnings; applauds the fact that the poorest third of pensioners will be 1,600 a year better off; welcomes the successful payment of Pension Credit from this month to over two million pensioners and the fact that 1.3 million are gaining more money than they had before; further supports the Government's approach to renew the pensions partnership, outlined in the recent Green Paper and Action Plan; commends plans to introduce a Pension Protection Fund, guaranteeing protection if a company scheme winds up; welcomes proposals to allow individuals to defer their state pension and draw it as a lump sum; looks forward to further measures enabling people to make an informed choice in pension provision, increase flexibility approaching retirement and to work free from age discrimination; and condemns the unfair, unaffordable and unsustainable policies of Opposition parties.

Neighbourhood Policing

Mr. Deputy Speaker: We now come to the second debate on the Opposition motions. I must inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Oliver Letwin: I beg to move,
	That this House welcomes the emerging political and professional consensus about the need to increase the level and effectiveness of neighbourhood policing in Britain in order to restore the confidence of the public but regrets that the Government is seeking to achieve this through a burdensome and ineffective bureaucracy; and urges the Government instead to return power to decentralised local policing and to make local policing more accountable to local people.
	As I will mention some things on which the Opposition and the Government are not in total agreement, I begin by acknowledging the significant overlaps and degrees of consensus that exist between us on neighbourhood policing. I am heartened that all three main parties agree, I think, that we need to do something serious to improve the effectiveness of national and international policing by increasing the co-ordination of the many bodies involved in that endeavour. That includes not only parts of the Metropolitan police, but other agenciesthe National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and parts of Customs and Excise, the immigration and nationality department and the security services. I hope and trust that we can advance on the basis of agreement, although we may be at variance over time, and sustain change in that aspect of our national life. I add that it is remarkable for a senior chief police officer to make a speech in which he applauds both the Home Secretary and myself for moving in the same direction on something, as he did on that policy.
	The second and last matter of consensus is that the Home Secretary and I agreeI suspect that the new spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten), whom I welcome to his position, will also agreeon the need for effective neighbourhood policing. That is not as anodyne as it might seem. Some years ago, many chief constables and the political parties would not have regarded that as a priority. For some years we were all under the sway of the idea that real, proper, professional policing involved turning away from the neighbourhood and towards the pursuit of the serious criminal by means of the intelligence model and other devices rightly and admirably developed by Sir David Phillips and others in our police forces.
	I think that, partly as a result of seeing what has been done in other countriesprimarily in some American jurisdictionswe have all now concluded that we need, in one way or another, to add to the splendid pursuit of effective means of containing the serious criminal a renewed emphasis on neighbourhood policing. I think that we also agree that this is not just a matter of reassuring people and making them feel comfortable, but of taking ownership of the neighbourhooda matter of putting the police officer into the neighbourhood and making him feel that he is its custodian. It is a matter of ensuring that the low-level intelligence that comes from a police officer's really knowing the people for whom he or she is responsible, and from their really knowing the officer, can be used to benefit the control of not just crime butequally importantdisorder.
	I believe that those aims are shared by Members throughout the House; it is about the means that there is so much debate. The Home Secretary and the Government have adopted a number of means to try to achieve the neighbourhood policing of which I have spoken. For instance, a huge amount of energy has been poured into initiatives, most recentlyin the last 36 hoursthe initiative on antisocial behaviour. [Hon. Members: Hear, hear.] We shall see whether Labour Members' delight persists.
	There have been many initiatives from the Home SecretaryI believe that they are currently running at roughly one a weekbut the record has not been entirely good. The night courts turned out to cost 8,000 a case, and have been abandoned. The cash point fines did not cost anything, because they were abandoned before they could. The child curfews have cost nothing, because there have been none. The proposal most apposite to the antisocial behaviour initiativethe proposal to withdraw housing benefits from bad tenantshas never been implemented.
	It might be regarded as a mere piece of cheap politics to point out that many of the initiatives do not exist, but a deeper issue is at stake. It must be admitted that some initiatives have been carried through and that some, in their own terms, have enjoyed some success. The question is, has anything sustainable been left behind?
	Let us take the street crime initiative. I have admitted publicly, and will go on record as admitting today, that it has succeeded to some extent, for a period, in the places to which it has been applied. It is true that it has been rather expensiveI believe that it costs about 14,000 per mugging eliminatedand that it has, to a degree, distracted the attention of the local constabulary: in the areas where street crime has fallen, burglaries have increased. Those, however, are not my main points, and over time they may no longer apply. The situation will vary from area to area.
	The real issue is that the lasting effect is unlikely to be great, because an initiative cannot deal with underlying problems. Drug-related crime is an example. The street crime initiative rightly identified, for instance, the need to ensure that the young hard drugs addicts who, I regret to say, are responsible for a huge proportion of acquisitive crimeespecially acquisitive street crimewere treated, and correctly stated that they would be treated very quickly. It failed to note, however, that no effective intensive treatment was available. As we all know, a large number of those young people were led up the garden path: they secured appointments, but they never secured intensive treatment. That is a serious failure to tackle the underlying problem.
	It is not just me who says these things. The Lord Chief Justice, who I do not believe is a supporter of the Conservative partynot that he is a supporter of any party; he does not speak from a political positionsaid:
	You can have initiative after initiative . . . but if you don't touch the basic problems, you will never achieve public confidence.
	I know that from time to time the Home Secretary comforts himself with the thought that members of the judiciary are wholly out of touch. I do not believe that, but the Home Secretary does, so let us hear from Jan Berry, the head of the Police Federationone could not get much more in touch with reality than thatwho said:
	There is a real danger that with the centre increasingly dictating police priorities, police resources will increasingly be skewed to respond to the latest high profile cause clbre
	she uses the term cause clbre because she is an intellectual; I use the word initiative
	to hit the media. Policing is not just about quick wins or one-dimensional responses. We are in the business of delivering long-term sustainable solutions to crime and disorder.
	That is indeed the business that we ought to be in. I do not believe that initiative after initiative is likely to deliver that result.
	It would be very unfairI hope that I have some reputation for being fair about these mattersto accuse the Home Secretary of merely engaging in initiatives. His energy is limitless, and initiatives occupy only a small part of it. He is also fond of creating bureaucratic structures. He inherited many and he has much amplified them. In the Home Office there are 63 units, 10 teams, six directorates, five groups and 25 miscellaneous bodies. In case that seems too abstract, let me retail to the Housemy hon. Friends will be surprised by this, as I wasa small sample of the units particularly concerned with a topic close to the Home Secretary's heart, criminal justice.
	There is the criminal justice performance directorate, the criminal justice local performance and delivery support, the criminal justice confidence team, the criminal justice strategic planning and analysis team, the criminal law and policy team, the Criminal Justice Bill team, the criminal law policy unit and the criminal procedure and evidence unit. I do not know what the ladies and gentlemen in those many directorates and units do or say to one another, but I rather imagine that there is some connection between confidence, performance, local performance, strategic planning, policy, Bills and procedure. If there is a connection, one wonders why there must be eight such units in the Home Office. And it is not just a matter of units. There could be a small number of people divided into a large number of parts, and that might be an effective way to proceed, but the Home Office statistics show that those are not small bodies. The criminal policy group has 537 members. The police and crime reduction group has 663 members. The community policy directorateI do not know what the community policy is, but the directorate is undoubtedly responsible for ithas 216 members.
	Of course, these hard-working and no doubt stressed-out officials, who probably need stress counselling because they are so busy talking to one another, are complemented by a tremendous apparatus for ensuring that the public are aware of their efforts. That is why the national publication directorate within the Home Officea remarkable termhas 233 members, and the communications directorate 232. I do not know why the communications directorate deserves one member fewer than the national publication directorate, or whether the communications are published by the communications directorate, or whether the publications are communicated by the publication directorate, but one way or another these 465 people are involved in communicating and publishing I know not what.
	I must inform my hon. Friends and the House as a whole that great effort goes into administering these administrators. The corporate development and services directorate and personnel directorate have 952 people between them952 people administering the administrators.

Nick Palmer: If I have counted correctlyhe will correct me if I am wrongthe right hon. Gentleman has so far mentioned a total of around 1,300 people. The proportion of the crime prevention budget represented by those people is less than 0.1 per cent. When will the right hon. Gentleman come on to the remaining 99.9 per cent. of our effort?

Oliver Letwin: I will proceed to that. I have considerable respect for the hon. Gentleman, as he knows, but the main problem about these ladies and gentlemen is not the amount that it costs to maintain themalthough that is undoubtedly considerablebut the costs that they impose on the system by obscuring it, obfuscating and destroying incentives. How do they engage in the activity of lessening the effectiveness of our police forces? An admirable document has been produced, entitled The National Policing Plan 20032006. I can best describe the wonders of that plan by revealingI summarisethat it is about ensuring that KPIs fit into BVPIs so that they form part of the PPAF so that they can be made part of the PR so that the PSU can ensure that the Home Office delivers its PSA. That is the great work that is being done under the heading of the national policing plan.
	What does that mean in practice? I shall quote at some lengthI hope that the House will forgive mefrom the magazine Constabulary:
	the Home Office, attempting to satisfy the Treasury's demand for numerically measurable results, converted the initiative into a bureaucratic obstacle
	that is, obstacles such as those I mentioned to the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer). The magazine continues:
	They insisted that persistent offenders must be defined as those who had been convicted of at least six offences in the previous 12 months.
	The Home Secretary may feel that that is admirable, but the chief constables were not so persuaded. They
	complained that was a definition not of a persistent offender but of a stupid one; that it diverted their efforts from the clever offender who had evaded conviction and also from the imprisoned offender who was about to be released without any recent convictions simply because he had been locked up; that it invited them to go after the schoolgirl who had been caught shoplifting six times but not the habitual burglar who had only been caught twice.
	That is an example of my point: the targets distort things.

David Blunkett: So when the debate on bad character takes place and the Conservatives vote in the House of Lords, will they support us in ensuring that the police can take evidence to the courts in situations such as those that he describes, where people have not been jailed for offences?

Oliver Letwin: The Home Secretary and I have a slightly different view of the meaning of justicethat has emerged during the debates on the Criminal Justice Bill. I have never quite believed that being shown to be innocent on several occasions is a good basis for being shown to be guilty on the next. I believe that effective policing is directed towards those people about whom the police have suspicions, but that in court, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the particular offence is the greatest bulwark of our liberties.

David Blunkett: So what is the definition of an offender? Is it someone who has been found guilty of an offence, or is it someone who is suspected of having committed an offence but has never been arrested or found guilty of it? Given the right hon. Gentleman's ridiculing of the definition of a persistent offender as one who has been found guilty six times, I presume that he would want to back the police in saying that those who have not been found guilty and designated an offender should now be designated an offender according to that definition.

Oliver Letwin: The Home Secretary needs to engage in a paradigm shift. He seems to believe that my attack is on his target, but the problem lies not only in the target, but in the idea of such a target. The police need to know which people to go after and to go after them, not spend their time working out whether those people fit the definition in the Home Secretary's national policing plan. That is the fundamental difference between us. I accept that he passionately and sincerely wants to get the same result as I do. He wants to get those people behind bars, or at least off the conveyor belt to crime. I accept that there is unity between us on that. He thinks that he can achieve that through bureaucratic targets; I think that it should be done by letting the professionals get on with the job. That is the fundamental difference between us.

John Denham: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it would be sensible if the police went after not only those who are regularly convicted but those who are identified locallyfor example, through the national intelligence modelas being a significant cause of crime in the area? If so, does he also agree that the national policing plan, which was published last year, makes it clear to the police that they should pursue the very people being identified by the national intelligence model? What the right hon. Gentleman has portrayed today as the contents of the plan are not in fact the contents of the plan.

Oliver Letwin: I hope that my response will not be seen as unfair, but I very much welcome that intervention because it enables me to remind the former Minister, who was to some degree responsible for the national policing plan, just what the chief constables said about it.

Chris Ruane: What do they think about your sheriffs?

Oliver Letwin: I think that the hon. Gentleman will reflect in a moment that that might not have been a wise intervention.
	I shall quote again from an article in Constabulary:
	For many months, in private, the most senior officers in the land told Mr Blunkett their opinion of this central manifesto of the Government's attack on crime.
	That is referring to the national policing plan. I apologise in advance for this, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I hope that what I am about to say is parliamentary language, but it is in a quotation. The article continues,
	One chief constable captured in a single vivid sentence the message his colleagues conveyed: Frankly, sir, with respect, this is crap.

John Denham: He did not actually ever say that; that is the problem. I hope the House will accept that, although I may not have been present at every meeting that took place between my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the chief police officers, I was there for virtually all of them. I was also present at every meeting at which the Association of Chief Police Officers was represented at the most senior level in drawing up the national policing plan. The right hon. Gentleman quite reasonably quotes from something that has been published in a non-official magazine, but I hope he will accept that those words were never said in relation to the plan, and that the plan was agreed by a whole variety of organisations, including ACPO. It would be wrong to proceed on the basis that things were any different from that.

Oliver Letwin: Because I know that the former MinisterI say this without a hint of ironyis someone who is persistently determined to tell the truth, I accept that the magazine might be wrong in the particular. However, I spend a large amount of my timeas the former Minister used togoing round the police forces of this country, and I hear what chief constables tell me when they are not under the Minister's eye and when they have not been able to be persuaded by the power of the purse. I can assure the House that the chief constables' view of the national policing plan is not something that would make happy reading for Ministers.
	We cannot take lightly the demoralisation that these tactics of excessive bureaucracy have created. The gentleman who is currently the Secretary of State for Education and Skills was once a Minister in the Home Office. [Interruption.] I do not know about that. I was not in my present post at the time. I do know, however, that in December 2000, the right hon. Gentleman said one thing that was very true:
	The number of people leaving a profession may be taken as an indicator of morale.[Official Report, 11 December 2000; Vol. 359, c. 65W.]
	That is not a statement by a Conservative or Liberal Democrat spokesman or a Back Bencher; it is a statement by a Minister.
	In 1997, there were 774 resignations from the police forces of this country. In 200102, there were 1,644 resignationsan increase of 112 per cent. As we go round the country, the reality strikes us over and over again. I hope that the Home Secretary will attend to this; he must know that it is the case. There is intense demoralisation in our police forces as a result of the amount of bureaucracy with which they are faced. The Home Secretary can deny that to himself or deny it in public as much as he likes, but the fact remains[Interruption.] It is not fantasy, as the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing, and Community Safety says, chuntering from a sedentary position. If she is so protected by her officials, her cars and her grandeur that she cannot understand what the ordinary police officers of this country are feeling, it is very bad news. I accept that it is difficult for reality to pervade the Home Office, but that is the reality.
	Interestingly, at a recent meeting with a prominent chief constable, some of my colleagues were toldI have heard this over and over againthat there is an increasing disinclination at present even to use stop and search because of the Home Secretary's recent proposals to enforce over-burdensome reporting.
	On Friday, I was in a police station in East Yorkshire[Hon. Members: For begging?] I had no opportunity to beg. Police officers were telling me time and again that they simply could not bear the number of forms they were now compelled to fill in.

David Blunkett: It is important to put it on record that we have not introduced the new reforms to stop and search in East Yorkshire.

Oliver Letwin: Is that not remarkable? It was not in East Yorkshire but elsewhere that the report about stop and search was given to a colleague. I will have a private conversation with the Home Secretary and tell him where it was. In East Yorkshire, coppers were showing me other forms that they had to fill in and were telling me of their demoralisation. I have no reason to suppose that they were trying to mislead me; they were giving me an impression that emerges over and over again.
	There is another point that is at least as important, if not more so, as demoralisation, resignations, chief constables feeling that their priorities are distorted or complaints by the Police Federation, although all those are of some importance. The most important point is where the attention lies. As in any organisation, the effectiveness of the police will depend on where they are focused. They can be focused only on one of two places. They can either look upwards to the Home Office or downwards to the customers they are meant to be serving: the populations on whose behalf they are policing. It is not possible to face in both directions at once.
	The common experience of people at all levels in the police force today is that they are being driven to look upwards, which will diminish and not increase their attention to their customers. In May, the chairman of the Police Federation said:
	We are seeing more and more priorities, targets and diktats handed down from the centre but often they fail to reflect public concerns and divertthat is my pointpolice resources away from the kind of policing the public want and indeed the style of policing that can make a genuine difference to tackling disorder.
	He added that policing was not just about number-crunching, record burglary detection rates or street robbery initiatives. It was about providing reassurance to the public closer to home.

Robert Key: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Home Office police forces also need to look sideways? If he casts his mind back to a visit to Bulford in my constituency, he will recall that he came across the Ministry of Defence Police's DAREdrug abuse resistance educationproject, which is educating children in schools against drugs and alcohol. He will recall that, in many areas, Home Office police forces are working closely with the MOD police and the military police and we must see this in the round if we are serious about neighbourhood policing.

Oliver Letwin: Of course my hon. Friend is right. The DARE project is a good example of the long-term attitude to policing that I am recommending. I suspect that not a single target set by the Home Office has ever been brought closer to fulfilment by the DARE project. I suspect that if chief constables were to follow exclusively the recommendations of the national policing plan and try to fulfil the targets set for them by the Home OfficeI pray that that will never be their sole objectivethey would pay no attention all to the DARE project, which seeks to lead youngsters away from drugs. The Home Secretary wants that to happen just as much as I do, but he is creating an apparatus that has the opposite effect.

James Purnell: The right hon. Gentleman has been speaking for nearly half an hour and has not even mentioned his policy from his party conference about increasing police numbers. Is that because it has fallen apart so badly that he has already ditched the policy? If he is not to have targets, performance monitoring or a national police plan, how will he enforce his policy in the first place?

Oliver Letwin: I am sorry to ask the hon. Gentleman to exhibit just one and a half minutes' more patience, but my next plan of action is indeed to mention our policy.

Several hon. Members: rose

Oliver Letwin: I have taken many interventions from Labour Members, I hope to the benefit of debate, but I shall take none further as I have been invited to pursue this issue.
	Before I move on to describing the alternative that we proposed at our party conference, and which we will continue to propose during the next 18 monthshopefully, we will eventually have the opportunity to implement itI want to point out that it is not just the Conservative party, the constabularies of this country and ordinary electors who have noticed that there is a problem. The Home Secretary certainly speaks the language of community policing, and as if he wants to increase the focus on the customer, but that does not persuade even The Guardiana journal which I think supports the Labour party on the whole. One of its leaders stated:
	New Labour doublespeak continues: much talk of devolution to local basic command units, while new powers are consolidated at the centre. Stalinism won't work because constables have to have discretion.
	What is our alternative? It is threefold and quite simple, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (James Purnell) for prompting me to describe it. First, there must be resources; secondly, there must be professional autonomy; thirdly, there has to be local accountability. The resources issue is plain. As Members are probably aware, I am not the greatest proponent in this House of expanded public expenditure. On the whole, I have been devoted to reducing public expenditure, so I did not begin in my current post by assuming that what the police need is more resources. But like the Home Secretary, I have been to other countries, talked to other police forces and seen what has been achieved. One common pattern that emergedI hoped that this issue might prove common ground, but I fear that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has come between usis that our police forces are relatively and absolutely under-resourced. They do not have enough coppers to undertake proper pursuit of serious criminals under the national intelligence model, or to get police on to the streets. There is no solution to that problem, other than to provide them with the resources that will enable them to get police on to the streets.
	I want to congratulate the Home Secretary, although I hope that he will not object and think it a brussels sprout congratulation. [Interruption.] The Home Secretary referred to me in that way in his party conference speech, so it is his phrase, not mine. I want to congratulate him on increasing very significantly this year the rate at which he is increasing police numbers. Some 9,000 extra coppers have been recruited since the election. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) reduced police numbers when in his previous post, which was not the right direction in which to go; indeed, he needed a little encouragement in such matters. To the current Home Secretary's credit, he has increased police numbers, which is marvellous. We have 9,000 extra coppersjust 1,000 fewer than the number of additional administrators taken on since this Government took office.
	The strike rate is now respectable. As I understand it, the Home Secretary has allowed the police forces to employ more than 4,000 additional coppers in the financial year. Marvellous. That rate now needs to continue for seven or eight more years. We need to achieve a figure of some 40,000 additional police officers, and I do not believeI hope I am not being over-optimisticthat any Labour Member in the House today, or anyone who has the right to sit on the Labour Benches, disagrees with that well-known fact.

Mark Oaten: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Letwin: I would not normally do so, but as the hon. Gentleman is making his first appearance in the House in his current guise, I feel compelled to give way.

Mark Oaten: I am most grateful. Can the right hon. Gentleman explain how he arrived at the 40,000 figure? What independent assessment informed him that this country needs 40,000 extra police officers?

Oliver Letwin: I shall indeed tell the hon. Gentleman how we came by that figure: it is not an independent assessmentit is ours. Indeed, it is the responsibility of a possible future Government to assess that matter. We looked at the level of policing available in New York, which is the most successful example of neighbourhood policing in the world. Since it began its new neighbourhood policing and its serious attack on disorder, it has reduced crime by about 60 per cent. on a sustained basis over 10 years.
	The level of policing that we recommend for this country is per capita almost identical to that in New York. That was the basis on which we derived our figures. We then cross-checkedthis will interest the hon. Member for Winchester who is also concerned about rural areasagainst the question of how we could be sure that a police officer would be available for every parish in this country. We found, not altogether to our surprise, that roughly the same number would enable that to occur. If this country were one in which our cities were policed as in New York and in which our rural areas were able, after many years of failure, to have a police officer in charge of the parish who knew the parish, it would make a huge difference to public confidence in the control of public order in this country.

Ivan Henderson: rose

Oliver Letwin: I will not give way.
	I turn now to professional autonomy. There is no hope of restoring serious professional autonomy so long as the Home Office continues to run local policing. There is too much of a temptation for Ministers to do exactly what the Home Secretary and his colleagues have donetry to run the whole show on the basis of strings pulling puppets. That applies to the present national policing plan or any other such plan. We have to move power away from the centre to the localities and give back to the police the professional autonomy that comes from not being controlled from on top.

Ivan Henderson: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Letwin: No.
	That is why I proposed at the Conservative party conference last weekand will continue to propose and developour plans to give serious autonomy to the police.

Ivan Henderson: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Oliver Letwin: I will not: otherwise Government Members will accuse me of continuing for too long.
	We have to create for the first time in English law a statutory version of the Denning doctrine. We must establish the absolute right of the chief constable to operational independence, so that no politicianlocal or centralcan tell a chief constable how to behave in respect of operations.
	The third elementthat of local accountabilityis equally important. Once we have removed powers from the Home Office, we cannot dispense entirely with the democratic check. If the check cannot, in order to avoid a top-down centralist bureaucracy, be from above, it must be local. If a serious transfer of power to the localities goes ahead, we can expect local electorates for the first time to take an interest in those elected to police authorities under a system of direct election.

Ivan Henderson: rose

Oliver Letwin: I have every confidence that that thesis is gaining ground. I say that because, just a couple of days[Interruption.]

Chris Ruane: rose

Oliver Letwin: When the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) hears who I am about to quote, he might change his mind. A couple of days after our announcements, Sir Ian Blair, deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, and two other chief constables with whom he was working, came up with a most illuminating, inspiring and excellent set of proposals. I shall quote from Sir Ian's speech:
	It is now becoming increasingly clear that what we would describe as policing for the purposes of reassurance has got to become a matter as significant as preventing and detecting recorded crime; we have to understand what it is that people see as being the signal events which show disorder within their community . . . I am quite certain that this will be pointing the police service towards its role in the strengthening of communities . . . We need to go much more local, much more accountable . . . However, it is no use doing so, unless those local policing boards can actually determine what the local police should broadly be doing . . . If localism is to work, then the number and weight of national . . . targets must lessen.
	A direction is discernible here that is not only the direction of the constabularies and the Conservative party, but of the most serious professionals in today's police forces.
	In summary, the argument is simple. The need for neighbourhood policing is a matter, as I said earlier, of consensus. That top-down bureaucracy directing insufficient resources to the police does not work is an emerging consensus among those most seriously involved. A consensus is also emerging that the way forward is a properly resourced professional autonomy subject to local democratic accountability. The Home Secretary is part of that emerging consensus at the level of rhetoric. [Interruption.] As he says quietly from a sedentary position, he writes such things. He does. He writes and says such things, but he does not do them. The question is, when will the Home Secretary stop merely talking about localism and professional accountability and autonomy, and start doing them?

David Blunkett: I beg to move, To leave out from House to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	welcomes the Government's investment in policing which has resulted in 136,386 officers by the end of August 2003, an increase of more than 4,000 since December 2002 and the highest level ever; notes that there are now more than 1,900 Community Support Officers and record numbers of police staff assisting police officers in their work; further notes the priority given by the Government to reducing bureaucracy to enable officers to concentrate on frontline duties; and welcomes the Government's commitment to further reform to improve accountability and engagement between the police and the communities they serve.
	I welcome the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) back from his exertions in Blackpool, which profoundly demonstrated to the world his grasp of inner city problems and the difficulties of disadvantaged areas and how glad he is that he has nothing to do with them. Well, I do. I was brought up in such an area, I represent such an area and I am proud to say that what is happening in my area, as a result of the last six and half years of this Government, is transforming the life chances of children, giving hope to adults, engaging them in the solutions that they want for their communities and inspiring them to believe that they can make a difference. That is the difference between the right hon. Gentleman and myself.
	We are all looking forward to the right hon. Gentleman's forthcoming visit to fantasy island, once he has identified which island it is. On that island, with the asylum seekers, there will be sheriffs and new local boards. They will seek to hold to account the local chief constable who will have been granted complete autonomy. Not only could the Home Secretary not require or demand anything on behalf of the people who elected the Government who then selected him, but of course the local board and sheriff would not be able to demand anything of the local chief constable. Autonomy means complete freedom from any political direction and complete detachment from any requirement from whoever has been elected locally or nationally. That cannot be the same thing as accountability. The right hon. Gentleman used the word direction and he quoted Sir Ian Blair accurately. We agree with Sir Ian Blair, but he also mentioned responsiveness and accountability.

Oliver Letwin: Does the Home Secretary recognise the difference between operational autonomy and the general character of policing in an area, and does he accept that a force can be operationally autonomous and also accountable to a local, directly elected police authority for the general pattern of policing?

David Blunkett: Of course I accept that, and the police already have operational responsibility. At another time and in another place, we might have an interesting intellectual debate about where the line lies between operational responsibility and some form of accountability. If the police authorities, or their successors under the Conservative schemeor revisions under the scheme that I shall bring forward for consultationhave any form of influence, let alone power, there has to be an understanding of where the power lies. Otherwise, we would have a Home Secretary who appeared on the Today programme and bemoaned the fact that nothing could be changed. Under the scheme devised by the Conservatives, Home Secretaries could not do anything, because they would have no power. They might want to suggest change, but they would have to get in touch with the multiplicity of different police forces, sheriffs and boards. What is more, the local sheriffs and boards would not be able to effect change, because nobody would know what they could ask the chief constable to do.

Ivan Henderson: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the comments by Robert Chambers, the chair of Essex police authority, on the Conservatives' proposal to introduce sheriffs? He has tried to raise his concerns, and those of his colleagues, with the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), but he says in an article on the subject that he has not even had the courtesy of a reply. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the right hon. Gentleman should start listening to his own members and to the chairs of police authorities before he introduces such a ridiculous initiative?

David Blunkett: I agree entirely with my hon. Friend's prognosis. We do not have to disagree with Opposition Members: they disagree with each other so readily that the matter is taken out of our hands.
	In future, we may disagree more with the Liberal Democrats than with the Conservatives. I should like to take this opportunity to welcome to his new post the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten). I am sure that the House will be looking forward to shorter speeches from now on. I have paid tribute to his predecessor, who had real commitment and understanding and who was certainly around a long time in connection with Home Office matters. His contributions were enjoyable but

John Bercow: He got paid by the word.

David Blunkett: As the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) says from a sedentary position, the hon. Member for Winchester's predecessor was, like Dickens, paid by the word. We understood his words, and we heard them often and tediously. Nevertheless, we are very pleased to welcome the hon. Member for Winchester, who I believe is the chairman of the Peel group. That group aims at uniting moderate Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and will no doubt give new meaning to the adage that, if one peels a Liberal Democrat, one will get the taste of the Conservative underneath. We look forward very much to seeing the unity of purpose between people in Dorset and in Hampshireand wherever else the Liberal Democrats can manage to take Conservative seats in the next general election.

Peter Kilfoyle: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

David Blunkett: How could I resist?

Peter Kilfoyle: Before my right hon. Friend moves on, does he share the suspicion that some of us have about what the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) means when he speaks of local democratic accountability? Does he suspect that the right hon. Gentleman does not mean the accountability to the broader community that my right hon. Friend and I understand, but accountability to a group of the local great and good? That might be acceptable to the right hon. Gentleman, but not necessarily to the communities involved.

David Blunkett: My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. These days, the word sheriff refers to those who are appointed to represent the Queen's interests and to attend dinners and banquets. I am sure that the role is very important, and I commend the people who perform it. However, times have changed since the days of the sheriff of Nottingham, who it must be said did not have too good a reputation in mediaeval England. I should be interested to hear the definitions that will be produced in due course.
	However, I was going to say that the one matter on which the right hon. Gentleman and I appear to agree is that we require more law enforcers and crime fighters. We are very proud that there are 136,386 police officers now. That is some 9,000 more than when we came to office, and 4,110 more than at the beginning of this year. We are proud that we have almost 2,000 community support officers, who did not exist until we pushed the idea through this House and encouraged local forces to take them on. At the time, it was claimed that that would not happen, but of course it has, and the new officers are welcome on the ground.
	I want to remind the House, and the Opposition, about street wardens. We supported that initiative, and funded it through what is now the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. People are very keen about including those wardens in the police family.

Mark Francois: Will the Home Secretary give the comparable figures for the numbers of special constables in the police service over the years to which he is alluding? He will be aware that there has been a large decline, with many special constables leaving the force because they were so disillusioned.

David Blunkett: Yes, there has been a decline in the number of specials. I regret that, as the civil renewal agenda requires that people who are not full-time police officers but who are prepared to devote some of their own time to the joboften between six and eight hours a weekshould be encouraged to do so. I want to find ways to encourage employers to release people for a little time each week. I want to look into new ways to encourage the badging of those involved in crime prevention and protection with the powers that special constables have at present. Yes, there has been a reduction. Of course, my figures are for full-time equivalents. The number of people employed as full-time police officers and CSOs is a great deal higher than the 9,000 extra people I mentioned because some of them are part-time. We should bear that in mind.
	In the past six and a half years, there has been a drop in crime of more than a quarter. That has been true of burglary and car theft. Under the street crime initiative, there were 17,000 fewer theft and mugging offences last year and I am proud of that. We took that initiative. It made a difference to people's lives. Returning to what the right hon. Gentleman said about Jan Berry's comments, the public demanded that initiative because people were being mugged and robbed on our streets. If we had the right hon. Gentleman's system and the Home Secretary and Prime Minister had no powers, we would not have been able to act.
	The interesting aspect of this debate is that there would be no point in having it under a Conservative Government. Why debate community policing, the role of the Home Secretary and what the Government want, if the Government have no power and if full autonomy means that the Home Secretary merely does as the right hon. Gentleman suggests? I suppose that the idea has been drawn from the ideological vacuum in which the Conservatives have been livingit is what Nicholas Ridley once described as a situation where a Secretary of State would convene a lunch once a year, let contracts and then go on holiday. I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman, who is gentler, more convincing and more understanding than the late Nicholas Ridleyfor whom I had a lot of time as an ideologue but not as a politicianactually believes the same sort of garbage. Nicholas Ridley once said that we could solve London's traffic problems if we did away with traffic lights. There was a free market logic to that. When people were so snarled up that they could not get their cars out of their driveway, they would go on the tube. The only problem is that unless one invested in public services to improve the tube, they would not be able to get on that either.
	Yes, we want investment and accountability, but we want it in the real world, to reflect what is happening on the ground. The motion talks about the return of powers. The return of powers to whom? Is it to the chief constables? Which powers have this Government taken away from them? How have we diminished the powers of constables on the street? We have increased them. We have given them greater powers, although they do not always know that they have them. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said on the radio yesterday that he had just discovered a local constable who did not know of the powers on off-road vehicles and their confiscation in the Police Reform Act 2002 .
	The motion talks of decentralising to local policing. Does that mean the sheriff, the board, or the chief constable alone? Are we simply to say that there should be 43, 80, 140 or whatever number of fiefdoms, which is what would happen under the Tory plan? Who will be the powerful person? Who will make the decisions? Who will be able to wield influence on behalf of the public?
	That brings us back to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle). In the end, we need to find a system that at the local level, in the neighbourhood, holds to account those who are working there and the commander of the unit, and gives them power and resources. Who has delegated the 50 million directly to basic command units? It happens to be this Home Secretary and this Government. Who has devolved to 30 of the basic command units with the highest levels of drug-related crimeunder the new initiative on criminal justice and drugsthe locally decentralised resources? It happens to be the same centralising, overbearing and over-powerful Home Secretary who is being criticised this afternoon.

Graham Allen: Some years ago, we tried the sheriff system in the city of Nottingham and it was found wanting.
	Is not the test for all parties what happens when there is consensus for community policing, or neighbourhood policing as it is referred to in this debate, but the local chief constable decides not to enact it, even when that chief constable has more police officers to deploy than at any time in the past? What do we do? What can local Members of Parliament, members of the public and indeed the Home Secretary do when confronted with that test? How do we surmount that problem?

David Blunkett: That is an important question and I invite chief constables, police authorities and Members of Parliament to assist us during the year ahead in a sensible dialogue about how to make the tripartite system work. This afternoon, the shadow Home Secretary has done away with the tripartite system, or he would do so if he had the power, which God forbid. The system cannot be tripartite if one of the three legs is taken away. The right hon. Gentleman would remove one legthe Home Secretary; he would remove the power and relevance of the post that he wants to occupy. He is asking the electorate to give him a majority to put him into a position that he could no longer occupy or take power to use. Secondly, he has made it clear that the rest of the tripartite approach would be disabled overnight by giving full autonomy to chief constables. The police authority would be able to think, but it would be unable to act.
	I want a dialogue about accountability in the neighbourhood and about how to achieve responsiveness without taking away the operational rights of the police. We cannot second guess or put in place the action necessary to catch criminals, to deal with criminal gangs and overcome antisocial behaviour, but we can give support and provide additional powers and resources. We can legislate, but we cannot do it all.
	There is a real issue about how we ensure that the extra police and those who work with them are visible, available and accessible on the street. How is it that we have 136,000 officers and all their additional support staff, including 10,000 additional civilian staff, amounting to a staggering 200,000 crimefighters36,000 more trained and uniformed police officers than 30 years agoyet people see fewer officers on the beat and in their communities and certainly feel that the police are not as accessible or responsive as they used to be? That question is profound.
	Even if we left aside the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which had to be brought in to overcome the injustice and misuse of power that was taking place, and if we stripped away the requirement to monitor at least basic equality of provision across the country, how could we get rid of the remaining burdens that are, it is claimed, the obstacle to the police being out on the beat? I said claimed because when we actually ask peoplenot just chief constables, but commandersto manage, they are inclined to suggest that it is not their job. However, I suggest that it is and that the six forces that have removed 2,800 surplus and unnecessary forms are the leaders in getting rid of bureaucracy. I cannot get rid of bureaucracy purely from the centre; we need local forces to do it, too.
	That exercise was started by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen who examined the diary of a police officer to see what was keeping officers in the station. We found that local forces were duplicating national forms. They were collecting data that had never been requested by the Home Office and asking constables to do things that were no longer required.
	Let us join things together. The O'Dowd taskforce, which included police officers of different ranks, came up with a set of proposals, some of which have been acted on. Some remain to be acted on and that must be done swiftly. However, the cry that all we have to do is remove the Home Office and get rid of any central involvement is nonsense. The moment that we did so there would be cries from across the country to reinstate the system.
	Yesterday, I met some of those people in the Conservative party who have embraced what the Government have done. I met those in the community protection department of Westminster city council who have effectively used the powers granted to them by using CCTV or embracing the new powers that we have given to local government through antisocial behaviour orders and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which has been so often ridiculed, but which is so often praised locally. I commend my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary for what he did in introducing that Act, which is being used.
	I shall tell the House what those in Westminster council told me. They told me that, two years ago, 1 per cent. of the borough's landmass accounted for 25 per cent. of the crime and that Leicester square was virtually unusable. They have used the powers in the 1998 Act and the resources that we have given them, as well as their own initiative, to pull together in that new community protection department, working hand in hand with Metropolitan police, to clean up Leicester square and the surrounding area, so it can be used by local people and visitors alike. I commend that Conservative council for its initiative in that respect, although not in any other way, and for using Government moneyafter all, Westminster gets enough of it, as those of us who were in local government know. If my city received anything like the per capita investment that Westminster receives, we could do a damn good job with it.

Julian Brazier: Will the Home Secretary also listen to Westminster council on the subject of what the Licensing Act 2003put through by his hon. Friends in the Department for Culture, Media and Sportwill do for the very issues that he mentions, not just in Leicester square, but across the whole area?

David Blunkett: That Department is pulling together its licensing, trading standards, health and safety and other activities to ensure that the lessons can be learned. I am absolutely certain that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport would agree that, if it were proved that those changesthe liberalisationcaused a major disadvantage or problem, we would address that. I should have thought that the Conservative party in its new free-nation mode would welcome the ability to act more flexibily at local level, although perhaps, with Charles Moore's departure from The Daily Telegraph, there will be a change in stance on the free-nation front.
	The police, local authorities and all those involved welcome the new powers that we have given to them to use fixed-penalty notices, which cut out bureaucracy. [Interruption.] It is no good laughing. Wherever we go, the police tell us that they welcome the fixed-penalty notices because they cut out the prolonged process that has bedevilled them. They welcome the investment that we making in new technology, including the Airwave system500 million of new technologyto make it easier to do the job. They welcome street arrests and cutting out the existing unnecessary burdens that are placed on them.
	But it is not this Home Secretary who is refusing to use the new video identification scheme in 18 forces; it is not this Home Secretary who is using helicopters, rather than people on the ground; and it is not this Home Secretary who introduced the mobile police, rather than the community police. In fact, most of that occurred under a Conservative Government. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, bravely said that the initiativesI use the word advisedlythat were taken 10 years ago and that moved away from community policing were a mistake, but they were not my mistake. They were not even Douglas Hurd's mistake. They were a mistake made, presumably, at local level; it was a trend that was picked up and used.

Dominic Grieve: The Home Secretary makes a point about bureaucracy, but I can assure him that, on the specific issue of the bureaucratisation of stop-and-search powers and their recording, the fact that those powers will be used less because of the associated bureaucracy is causing the police serious disquiet. I have to tell the Home Secretary that that is entirely the result of his Government's policy and we pointed out at the time that that policy would have exactly that consequence.

David Blunkett: It is very difficult to know what consequence the hon. Gentleman is talking about. We can judge the consequence when we have done it. We agreed to phase in a new programme, using technology and slimmed-down methods of simply writing down why someone had been stopped and searched. Correctly done, that will save time and difficulty and allow constableswho are accused constantly of racismto have greater confidence in undertaking stop and search, as they will be able to outline why it was undertaken and provide that note. That is not impossible, but because it causes such fear in the police service we said that we would experiment, ask forces to volunteer and see which approach worked best. That is what we promised to do and that is what we are doing. I do not think that it is unfair to provide people who are stopped and searched in the street with an explanation as to why, as long as we do not burden the policeon which I agree with the hon. Gentlemanin a way that would preclude them from doing it, and there is no evidence whatever that that is likely to take place.
	Let me quote from the shadow Home Secretary's speech in Blackpool, which is material to the debate this afternoon. He said:
	No more so-called National Policing Plans
	so there would be no overview from the centre in future. He said:
	No more centrally imposed targets
	so there would be no drive for the street crime initiative to achieve a particular goal. He continued:
	No more Whitehall-based units and initiatives.
	When is an initiative not an initiative? I suggest that it is when the Opposition propose it rather than the Government. An initiative is a decision to take action to overcome a perceived or real problem. Action is what Governments should be about, not ineptitude, inaction or inertia. It is about ensuring that when there is a problem, democracy can deal with it. If democracy cannot deal with it, we will see the rise of the British National party. A delegate at the Labour party conference in Bournemouth made the fair point that the way in which the Liberal Democrats sometimes behave undermines democracy, as they pretend that there are simple solutions, and that if only they were in power, all the difficulties would disappear. Well, they would not disappear, because governmentlocally and nationallyis difficult, as the Lib Dems found out in Sheffield, which is why they were booted out.

James Purnell: My right hon. Friend will remember that I used to be something of a policy wonk, and I think that the shadow Home Secretary used to be one, too. Is not the idea about sheriffs and, as my right hon. Friend mentioned, the possibility that the BNP could run policing in my area or his area, policy wonkery gone mad? Is not it the kind of ideological extremism that we would expect from the person who came up with the idea of the poll tax?

David Blunkett: That is absolutely certain. Once the Opposition get into an ideological framework that has a dead end, and their leader pleads for a novel ideaas the Leader of the Opposition said the other day, no one would deny that they had not come up with eye-catching initiatives

George Osborne: That was Blair's phrase.

David Blunkett: Ah, they were not initiatives. Fantasy island is not an initiative but a fantasy. When an initiative is from the Opposition it is a fantasy, but when it is from us it is an initiative. I am happy to plead guilty to an initiative, however, and I am happy to plead guilty to all the units that the right hon. Gentleman would also do away with, because they include the antisocial behaviour unit that we have established, which will drive forward and spread best practice at local level. Incidentally, if there were sheriffshere is the rubthey would need information. Even if they were going to approach or e-mail the chief constable to take him or her out to dinner to plead with him or her to do something, they would need comparative information. They would need to know the performance of their own force vis--vis other forces across the country. Is that agreed? [Hon. Members: Yes.] I am very pleased that it is agreed, and there were even some voices from the Opposition Benches who agreed. At the end of this wonderful quote from the shadow Home Secretary in his conference speech, he said, and performance monitoring. Who by? Oh, by the centre. Therefore, each of the 140 police services would set up their own little monitoring unit so that they could find out what other forces were doing, how they were doing it and what the performance looked like vis--vis their own. That is game, set and match.

Oliver Letwin: rose

David Blunkett: I am happy to give way for clarification.

Oliver Letwin: I apologise, because for quite a long time I thought that we were having an interesting debate. We now have slapstick instead.
	The Home Secretary surely realises that his standards unit, which is trying to run the activities of every basic command unit in Britain, collects information from the localities, brings it to the centre and then dispenses it back to the localities to tell them what to do. We are simply short-circuiting that activity in having the information at the local level where it can be acted upon effectively without the level of bureaucratic intrusion that is required when one is trying to operate such things from hundreds of miles away in Whitehall. That is a rational proposition. We may disagree about it, but surely the Home Secretary understands that there are two possibilities.

David Blunkett: Yes, there certainly are. To use the New York analogy, unless one can collate the information at the centrethat is what the commissioner in the New York force did from the various unitsone cannot make sense of the data and one cannot spread best practice. [Interruption.] I shall wind up, because I do not want to be speaking after all the Conservative Members have crept off to the 1922 committee to determine the future of their leader and their party.

Oliver Letwin: The Home Secretary has put in mind a point that he will find very difficult to wrestle with. If he thinks that New York is the model, does he believe that the Federal Government or the mayor run policing in New York?

David Blunkett: As the right hon. Gentleman will know, the mayor of New York had much more power over the police than I have over the police in Britain or that the Home Secretary had over the Met when he was directly responsible for it, which incidentally was the policy under the Conservative Government until we changed it. Six commissioners were sacked or removed under the previous mayor.
	To return to the issue, there is a real cost in any ideas that are put forward. The real-life costs of what Conservative Members want would not be felt in Dorset but in constituencies such as mine and those of many other hon. Members. The articulate can usually get their way. Those who have access to the media usually have their voice heard. Those who have the cash can move out of the areas of greatest disadvantage and antisocial behaviour. They can install alarm systems in their houses, and they can even live in enclaves where they employ what amounts to their own protection service.
	We want the same protections for the people we represent. When they approach us, we want to be able to tell them that a Member of Parliament can approach the Home Secretary and that there will be just a chance that the Home Secretary might be able to do something about the problem. We want to appear at the Dispatch Box with some levers to pull that would make a difference to the lives of the people we represent. We want democracy to work in such a way that when people vote, they believe that it will make a difference. We want to link that to greater accountability and responsiveness at local level and to a new debate about the reform agenda for the police and those working with the police in the family of the police.
	We want to do that as part of the regeneration programme at local level. We want to build the capacity of people to be able to take part in that debate and to be able to bring influence to bear. If we can get this right, the new tripartite approach will not take away responsibility for operational policing, but it will restore confidence that the police will react to the needs of the local community and that the Government will remove bureaucracy. However, the Home Secretary and his colleagues in Parliament will at least be able to go into a general election accepting some responsibility for what happens in our country, for the steps that we take to spread best practice, for the units we have established in making a difference and for the investment to go effectively into changing the nature of policing. That is what we are advocating; that is what we will vote for later tonight.

Mark Oaten: I start by thanking the Home Secretary and his shadow for their warm welcome, although I suspect that it will not last for long. I also pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). He had enormous energy and was a great guardian of civil liberties in this place. As chair of the Liberal Democrats parliamentary party for the past two years, I note the point about the length at which he made speechesI was aware of that myself. I shall try to be brief because I am sure that a much more interesting event is taking place on the Corridor UpstairsI note that fewer than 25 Conservative Members are in the Chamber.
	I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the police in my first Home Office speech. There is nothing more important than ensuring that we have a strong police force in this country that can protect and reassure peopleit is essential for that to be in place. Despite the differences that have emerged during the debate, it is important for hon. Members in all parts of the House to recognise that this country has an absolutely wonderful police force and that compared with many countries, ours is safe and secure. That is sometimes forgotten when we debate these issues.
	It is rightly in the nature of politicians to examine constantly how things can be improved, to react constantly to new problems and to want to endorse and approve new forms of technology so that we may improve the police force. Although I am sometimes critical of the fact that politicians always want change, it is right to try to respond and make improvements. With that in mind, I welcome several of the suggestions and initiatives that have been proposed by the Conservative party this afternoon. We need new thinking on the police and although I disagree with many aspects of the party's document, it brings forward new ideas that are worthy of merit, which I shall talk about later.
	A much bigger question is bubbling under the debate with which all three parties are trying to come to terms: what is meant by devolving down, new localism and central control? That is a real difficulty because politicians of all parties increasingly want to move toward a more local solution but, instinctively, we are nervous of doing that because we like to keep a form of central control given that we make promises at elections and such control is the only way to deliver on them. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) hit the nail on the head in his intervention because the real worry about letting go is not knowing what will happen when the system goes wrong or where the blame culture will lead. Devolution underlies the debate and I shall talk about it a little later in my speech.
	I largely agree with several of the shadow Home Secretary's criticisms of the Government's approach on crime and policing, although I do not have a clue what the reference to brussels sprouts was about. It must be an in-joke between him and the Home Secretary, so perhaps I shall be let in on it when I have been part of the club for a little longer. We have all heard anecdotally from our constituencies about the difficulty that the police have when juggling their real job of catching criminals, reassuring the public and reducing crime, and their burden. The word burden is used constantly and although I understand the Home Secretary's sensitivity, I have been in my job for only 48 hours and the word has been used many times by the police. They say that I must address the burden of their work load.
	I want to address the critical question of what the police should be doing. What do we mean by neighbourhood policing and what are the priorities? The Home Secretary said this weekand passionately this afternoonthat he is dissatisfied that some of the new police officers, whom I welcome, are not visible enough. It is hardly surprising that they are not visible enough because there is no doubt that they could be described as almost handcuffed to their paperwork and desks. I was troubled to experience that a couple of months ago when I went out on a Friday night in Winchester, which is not one of the most violent places on a Friday night.
	I was amazed by the lack of respect toward policemen and the extent of the provocation to which they were subjected. One policeman was spat atmiddle-class children under the influence of drink were doing such things. The problem was that there were only six officers out on that Friday night. I was amazed when they were spat at and called rude names, so I asked why they did not do something about it. They said, Look, we can't do something about it. If we do, we have to go back to headquarters and we will be in there for a couple of hours. Our judgment is that it is better to ignore it and stay out for the rest of the evening in case something worse happens. That cannot be right. Despite the Home Secretary's protests, there is concern about the work load balance. The Home Office report a year or so ago said that 17 per cent. of police time is spent on patrol. That means an awful lot of time is spent doing other things. I acknowledge that a lot of that work is worth while, but much of it is not appropriate police work.
	We welcome the establishment of a bureaucracy taskforce, but we also acknowledge that many police authorities think that that will only touch the tip of the iceberg. One message that came through in my discussions with police officers over the past 24 hours is that although the taskforce is welcome and many of the recommendations are good, much of the work revolves around switching from a paper-based system to an IT-based system. That is costly, complex and needs a great deal of support. Jan Berry, the chairman of the national Police Federation, sums it up well by saying that for far too long officers have been
	hamstrung by an unwieldy and excessively bureaucratic system.
	There is concern about that.
	I welcome the fact that the Home Secretary wants to tackle such issues. Perhaps he could take some of the pressure off chief constables, especially by reconsidering targets on burglary and robbery. I was interested in the evidence given to the Public Administration Committee by the chief constable of Thames Valley. He reported that when he faced what he regarded as unrealistic Home Office targets, his police authority chose to ignore them and to set its own. According to Home Office targets, Thames Valley would have been set a target this year of reducing robbery by 25 per cent. Instead, the local judgment is to reduce it by 10 per cent. Robbery fell by 18 per cent. in the previous year. Having achieved that cut, the police authority thought it unacceptable to move on to a Home Office aspirational target of 25 per cent.
	In such circumstances, it has to be right to give chief constables greater freedom to set targets as they think best. Central targets, inspections, audits and ring-fenced money undermine the ability of chief constables and police authorities to act. They are, after all, on the ground. They know the lay of the land, can identify the large problems and should have the freedom to set more targets themselves.

Nick Palmer: I worked in industry for many years and as a manager I would have liked to set the targets that I was to achieve. Does the hon. Gentleman not fear that chief constables will set targets that they are confident they can achieve so that they give themselves a slightly easier life?

Mark Oaten: I have yet to meet a chief constable who takes that approach. Most chief constables that I have met are committed to delivering a good and realistic job locally. They are not in the business of raising public expectations on which they cannot deliver, a criticism that we could, perhaps, level at some politicians.

Michael Clapham: The hon. Gentleman says that chief constables will be concerned with the local situation and adjust targets so that they are reasonable in the local context. Will that be based on figures produced by the local crime community safety groups? If so, does he agree that the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and the organisations that it established, moved the focus on to neighbourhood policing?

Mark Oaten: I agree that a key tool for chief constables is better and clearer intelligence drawn from data that reflect local experiences. I do not mind whether the data are managed locally or centrally and then used for local decision making. I want chief constables to take decisions based on the best possible forms of data available.
	On visibility and the politicians' dilemma of whether we should see more bobbies on the beat, we all know the Audit Commission's argument that a bobby on the beat will walk around an area and stop a crime once every 100 years. At the same time, we all say in our Focus leaflets and statements to the media that there must be more bobbies on the beat. We know instinctively that the public want to hear that, and while we may have our doubts about the effectiveness in terms of actual detection, we are aware that it is a good idea for the purposes of reassurance and some of the latest thoughts on neighbourhood policing.
	I welcome the national reassurance project, which steps outside some of the arguments about crime rates and concentrates on people's perceptions of the safety of their communities. We know now that visible policing makes a difference, but I am not sure that we have all the answers to what is the best form of it. I note with interest research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation: it was announced last week that a project near York had shown that an increased number of bobbies on the beat had actually increased the fear of crime. As a layman, I am not convinced that that is possibleit seems plain to me that more police in an area must provide some reassurancebut we should not dismiss it out of hand. It suggests that we need more research so that we can ensure that we are giving the reassurance that we think we are giving.

Oliver Letwin: The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting speech. First, does he agree that, according to the evidence, the constable involved in that project was not often on the streets? That seems to me to vitiate much of what has been said publicly. I am glad to note that the Home Secretary agrees.
	Secondly, does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is not solely, or primarily, a question of reassurance, but primarily a question of preventing crime and disorder where it would otherwise occur, and depriving the criminal fraternity or gang of the environment in which crime persists?

Mark Oaten: I take the right hon. Gentleman's point. There is a danger in some of the simplistic language that we have all used in speaking of increasing the number of police. The three main political parties tend to become involved in a Dutch auction in which we hear 9,000 from the Government, 10,000 from the Liberal Democrats and 40,000 from the Conservatives. That approach is too simplistic. We should try to make a genuine assessment. Perhaps what we need is an independent assessment of the number of police who are actually needed. I probed the right hon. Gentleman on that because I was horrified that he had plucked the 40,000 figure from the air on the basis of some evidence from America. A system based on such evidence does not strike me as sufficiently robust. To take the heat off the issue, the three parties should possibly assign a standing commission or review body to establish a realistic level of policing that is needed.
	Let me deal with the Conservative proposals in more detail. The right hon. Gentleman was prepared to take many interventions on the generality of the issue, but was not prepared to take many relating to the detail and substance of the proposals. He believes in devolution, or localism, and as a Liberal I support that. I do not want to knock the Conservatives' suggestions, because they are genuinely trying to achieve a different form of delivery, and we support that trend. It contrasts slightly with the Government's approach during their first five or six years in officealthough I am interested to note that over the past year they have placed much more emphasis throughout the public services on the need for fewer targets, and the need to devolve down and let go. The difficulty is that there is too much of the nanny state in this Government for them to be prepared to let go.

David Blunkett: Kiss granny good night.

Mark Oaten: I would thoroughly recommend that to the Home Secretary. Political thinking is, however, moving in the right direction. I do not think that the Conservatives have responded to many of the dilemmas relating to letting go of control. The most astonishing feature is the 40,000 figure: I am bewildered by how they arrived at it. The right hon. Gentleman is living in a fairytale world if he thinks that the cash needed to fund additional police numbers can be based on stumbling across some island for asylum seekers.

Shona McIsaac: Where?

Mark Oaten: Let us set aside for a moment not just the where question, but some of the legal issues arising from the Geneva convention on refugees, before even getting on to the subject of cost. Until we get answers to these questions, voters would be well advised to take the figure of 40,000 with a large pinch of salt. If the target is not to be met from some magical island, the shadow Home Secretary will have a difficult job convincing his shadow Chancellor to fund the proposals, given the shadow Chancellor's agenda to cut public spending.

Oliver Letwin: I am sure that in due course we will have many happy hours debating our asylum proposals. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will bear it in mind that in a couple of months he will hear a great deal from us about how we intend to tackle the legal issues. I expect that we will not agree about them, but our proposals will be clear-minded and extremely radical.

Mark Oaten: I cannot wait. If the right hon. Gentleman can bring an atlas and identify the island, that would be useful. Perhaps he could also help me understand the 40,000 figure. We have no published costings for it, so the best analysis that I have been able to come up with is that he took a calculator and keyed in the budget for the immigration and nationality directorate, which happily comes to 1.74 billion. He then pressed the appropriate button and divided that sum by the cost of training and paying a police constableabout 44,000 a year. Magically, that produced the figure of 40,000 police officers. I suspect that that is where the figure came from, not just from New York. Perhaps he will provide a more reasoned explanation for the costing.

Oliver Letwin: So that the debate does not continue tediously, let me explain that the savings of about 1 billion in the asylum and immigration system that we hope to achieve, which we can debate in due course, are intended to fund only the first four years of the programme, at about 50,000 a head. It is the New York experience, not the asylum facts, that leads us to the numbers. I have been entirely open about the fact that we do not yet know how we would fund the second Parliament of a Conservative Government, and I admit that I am not yet ready to assume that there will be a second Parliament of a Conservative Government, although I very much hope that there will be.

Mark Oaten: In the unlikely event that the right hon. Gentleman gets the first one, we will see what happens with the second one.

David Blunkett: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the figure is based entirely on the New York ratio, and New York lost 3,000 police officers last year, as it did, the figure is now down to 37,000 officers, presumably achieving the same goal?

Mark Oaten: The Home Secretary highlights the folly of basing a system in this country on the system in New York.
	I shall deal now with elected police authorities and elected sheriffs. If, under the system, decisions about money are to be devolved, it is difficult to see how the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) would be able to achieve the targets. Would there be some binding condition that the money that came through had to be spent on extra police? If that were not a binding condition, what controls would be in place to make sure that the target of 40,000 could be achieved?
	An important issue is involved. If 1.8 billion is available for extra policing, has the Conservative party worked out that extra police represent the best use of that money? Are there other police priorities that should be put in place? How does the Conservative party know that the number of extra police should be 20,000, 40,000 or 60,000?
	I welcome the record number of police officers announced by the Secretary of State earlier this month, and I hope that the Government will not allow numbers to slip, as they did in 1997. If major new resources are to be spent on further increases, such as the Conservatives suggest, surely that should be on the basis of evidence. I ask the right hon. Member for West Dorset to get out of the bidding war and join me in calling for a standing commission on policing. Such a body, independent of Government and staffed by experts, should examine the case for a large increase in police numbers, consider the costs and the potential benefits, and recommend a figure towards which we could all work.
	I shall touch on a couple of other aspects of the Conservative proposals. We did not hear much about sheriffs. I am not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman even mentioned the word. It did not feature in the consultation paper, but it featured prominently in the press coverage last week. Sheriffs were an idea imported from England and were ideally suited to the lawless conditions of the wild west, but is the lawlessness of Bristol and Manchester the lawlessness of Dodge City and the wild frontier? Can we expect sheriffs to go out on a Saturday night and take direct control? The American model of policing is not necessarily suited to this country. For a start, in America there are 18,000 US police departments. Imagine the issues of joined-up working if we moved towards much greater devolution along those lines. Assuming that sheriff powers were to be meaningful, another nightmare scenario was raised earlier. How would the right hon. Gentleman feel about the prospect of a BNP-sponsored candidate winning a directly elected election on a low turnout in, say, Bradford or Oldham? We trust our police to wield their power for the good of the whole community, not in the interests of one section of it, but there is a danger that that could start to happen in the event of such elections.
	There is another danger. The areas that most need reform and change may be those in which the electorate are less likely to get engaged in the process. We could end up with a chattering class culture of people who are heavily involved, while people in areas with more problems to be tackled are not involved.

James Paice: I join other Members in congratulating the hon. Gentleman on his appointment.
	Is it not somewhat odd that although the Liberals espouse a local income taxin other words, local people paying a local tax decided by local representativesthe hon. Gentleman does not want to give such local representatives any control over the police?

Mark Oaten: I am highlighting my concern about installing, on the basis of a low turnout, an individual with the power to take fundamentally important decisions. That is very different from a system based on an elected council comprising a large number of individuals.

Oliver Letwin: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mark Oaten: I promised that I would not be like my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey, so I shall take one last intervention.

Oliver Letwin: At least it demonstrates that the hon. Gentleman is saying something interesting, even if I do not agree with it. Is he proposing that the Liberal Democrat candidate for the mayoralty should not have the right to run London's police?

Mark Oaten: No: my proposition is that in an area as large as London one can take reassurance from the electorates and the existing system. My nervousness is based on some of the trends and examples that have emerged, particularly in northern cities where difficulties have arisen after elections with very small turnouts. I am urging caution on those who advocate the establishment of a powerful new elected tier, such as a sheriff, in those areas.
	Some of the Conservative proposals for the delegation of power and the reform of police authorities are not that different from the Liberal Democrat model. The structures and organisation of policing in England and Wales need to catch up with public expectation and the realities of crime and disorder, both locally and nationally.

John Bercow: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mark Oaten: I want to finish, as I made a commitment to try not to speak for too long.
	We already have a national police squad that deals with the most serious national and international crime and liaises with Interpol and Europol. There is an argument for reviewing and expanding its functions, perhaps merging it with the National Criminal Intelligence Service, Customs or special branch. The logic is that that new force should be accountable to the Home Secretary and an appropriate, more widely democratic authority along the lines of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. Alongside that body, there should be a common border force, as recommended by the Home Affairs Committee, to do away with the confusing alliance of police, immigration officers and Customs staff and to implement greater levels of security at our borders.
	We will support Conservative Members in the Lobby because we believe that the thrust of their new ideas is worthy of further discussion, but I have grave concerns about their approach. We tabled our amendment because we believe that if the structure of local policing is up for review, the rest could be, too. It has been 40 years since the last royal commission on policing. Given the comments that have been made about the possibility of setting up a national police force, there can be no doubt that we need a serious debate on the issues. I urge hon. Members to move away from rhetoric and bidding wars and to take up the Home Secretary's offer to look seriously at ways in which we can improve an already very good police force.

Peter Kilfoyle: I shall try to be as brief as possible, because so far the debate has mainly been a conversation between Front Benchers, and it should be informed by the experience of more hon. Members. I note that although the motion makes great play of neighbourhood policing, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) said little about the reality of neighbourhood policing on the ground. I would like to speak a little about that.
	I do not want to wax lyrical on sheriffs. We could make a lot of mischief out of the use of the word sheriff, but a posse of sheriffsor even of John Wayneswould not make much difference in constituencies such as mine, which operate under so-called neighbourhood policing.
	I am sad that the Liberal Democrats are going to join the Conservatives in the Lobby tonight, not least because, when the Government announced their initiatives yesterday on antisocial behaviour and low-level disorderas I describe itin communities, my local Lib Dem council immediately tried to upstage the Government by commenting that Liverpool city council was already geared up for getting rid of burnt-out cars within 48 hours. I had never heard of that service before. That breakdown in communication was underlined when I got one of my staff to try to speak to a real living person who could tell us something about the unit. My colleague spent the whole day trying, but failed to find anyone, and could see no mention anywhere in the council's indicators that it provided such a service. I am not saying that it does not, but the essential lesson is that it has to communicate to people the information about the services that it provides. That will be the gist of what I have to say about neighbourhood policing.
	I am a firm admirer and supporter of the police in my authority who are trying to put neighbourhood policing into effect and stand second to no one in my admiration of the difficult work that the police do generally. I recognise that there have been great successes in neighbourhood policing in the Merseyside police authority area, as I am sure the Home Secretary and chief constable would agree. However, I want to talk about my constituency, which is a classic inner-city area.
	The way neighbourhood policing works in my part of the world is that a number of local government wards are grouped together and a police resource allocation is then made to them, normally comprising about 30 constables, two sergeants and an inspector. In theory, the first point of contact is the inspector. That sounds quite a lot for a relatively small local government unit, but when we examine the situation in detail, we find that the officers work a shift system, so two thirds of them are not on duty at any one time. We also find that some people are away on training courses or holiday leave. We then discover that the numbers are made up with what I describe as ghost workerspeople on long-term sick leave who have been allocated to a particular unit to effect neighbourhood policing, but who never appear because they are on permanent sick leave. That is grossly unfair to the officers who are trying to work in these under-staffed units. I have been out with them and seen the work that they do, and I recognise that they can only do so much in any given working day. It is also unfair to the communities that have a right to expect those units to do the job that has been allocated to them, namely neighbourhood policing.
	The problems that result from all this are immense. First, there is a rotation of the people in charge of the teams, and in the composition of the teams themselves. By the time one person has got to know the community leaders in an area, they are moved on or promoted. There does not seem to be any consistency.
	A second problem that I always encounter relates to priorities. I was interested to hear what the shadow Home Secretary said earlier about the operational autonomy of chief constables. Yes, chief constables and senior management can decide what their operational priorities should be. In my area, they have made a decision that the priority, certainly at weekends, should be to flood the city centre with police officers, and they do. It is a very safe city centreso safe that the Duke of Westminster commented that he was happy when his daughters travelled from Eaton Hall to Liverpool, but not when they went out in Chester. That is his view.
	Liverpool has a very safe city centre, but when all those officers are in the centre, they are not policing the neighbourhoods where people live. In those areas, one cannot get a response from the police. If one does, it is not followed through. The most repeated subject in my surgeries and postbag and on the telephone comes from people bedevilled by low-level disorder. What do I mean by that? I mean the vandalism that leads to burnt-out cars, gangs of scallywags on the streets making people's lives a misery and the archetypal neighbours from hell who appear to know no bounds when it comes to their irresponsibility towards their neighbours.

John Horam: I can reinforce that point. I had cause to investigate a serious incident in Orpington, but found to my horror that because of a police exercise in Kent and an exhibition at the dome there was only one policeman in the whole of Orpington to deal with antisocial behaviour.

Peter Kilfoyle: That is a repeated problem; I hear the same story from colleagues around the House.
	We all accept that the police must prioritise, but when we bandy police numbers around, do we know what a realistic figure is? I am sure that we could go from 40,000 to 100,000 without meeting the real demand. The professionalism and expertise of senior management in police forces is shown by how they manage their resources and how they grade, in an elastic and organic way, the priorities in their operational area at any given time.
	I wish to give some examples of incidents in my area where I have tried to raise instances of antisocial behaviour and low-level, localised crime within the context of community policing. When I checked, I was horrified by the lack of response to alleged crimes that do not appear to have been investigated. I wrote to a senior officer on 7 July and pointed out a house that was being used to sell drugs, the telephone boxes used for drug drops, the registration numbers, makes and colour of the cars and the times at which they went back and forth. I described the concerns expressed to me by local residents. That was on 7 July; I have had no answer.
	I wrote on 27 May to list allegations made by a woman, including assault, harassment, threats to kill, criminal damage, more common assault and burglary. I still have had no response. I am not saying that the police have not responded, but it would be nice to know that they have. I should like to liaise with my constituents and tell them that an incident is being followed up and action taken. That is not the case. It is not that we let these incidents lie; we try to elicit a response and fill the black hole in communication.
	On 26 April, I raised the usual story: bunches of youngsters creating mayhem and damaging property. There was no answer. I can go back further, to 31 March, when I wrote about antisocial behaviour by youngsters. There was no answer. This is not about bureaucracy. I am asking someone to pick up the phone and let my constituents and me know that the police have taken cognisance of the comments and are attempting to make people's lives a little more tolerable by some sort of intervention.
	On 27 March, I asked why scrambler bikes had not been confiscated. There was no answer. On 24 February, allegations were madeI kid you not, Mr. Deputy Speakerof rape, siphoning off money and arson, yet still there is no answer as to what the police are doing in that case.
	Incidentally, I issued a press release on Monday, not knowing of the announcement that was to be made by the Prime Minister. My view was very simple and the press release was headed, Neighbourhood policing is not working.
	I wish to give an example to the Conservative party, the party of business, of what a business has to contend with when neighbourhood policing is not working. Mr. N. Harrison, the managing director of a small dairy that has been built up and now employs 30 of my constituents, wrote to me with a list of incidents. The following account sounds funny initially, but it is no laughing matter. He states:
	The most recent event was on Saturday August 9th at 4.30 am. One of my drivers was out in his milk float and was followed by a car carrying 6 or 7 youths. At some point 2 of the youths got out of the car and got into the float either side of the driver. They forced him to drive all around the streets in the Oakfield Road area and would not let him out.
	Eventually, they
	took control of the float and drove it into two telephone kiosks demolishing them. They then ran away.
	The driver telephoned the depot and a supervisor was sent out. The depot telephoned 999 to report what happened and to make a formal complaint. Mr. Harrison said:
	We had no response whatsoever from the police, but they did take the time to contact BT to ask them to clear the site of the demolished kiosks. It is now . . . August 12.
	So in three days, the police never responded to the 999 call. Mr. Harrison continues:
	I am having extreme difficulty recruiting staff.
	Are we surprised?
	A business is being threatened, individuals are being threatened, and residents' lives are being made a total miseryall under the aegis of neighbourhood policing, which I am told works. Forgive me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for being extremely doubtful about the efficacy of neighbourhood policing. As I understand it, it is not about the high-flown rhetoric of various Front Benchers but about trying to improve the lives of the people on the ground, who desperately need the police to intervene if there is to be any tangible improvement.

Dominic Grieve: The hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. Does he agree that one thing that would be useful in the context of crime against retail business is some figures? It is remarkable that no central statistics on retail crime whatsoever are collated.

Peter Kilfoyle: That may or may not be soI do not doubt the hon. Gentleman's wordbut my only concern is the constituents whose interests I represent.
	In closing, I repeat that I am aware that neighbourhood policing can be very effective in many areas, including on Merseyside, but I can only speak from my own constituency experience and the particular problems in it.

Richard Bacon: I shall try to be brief, as I know that other Members wish to speak. Our motion states that we believe that the Government are seeking to achieve their aims
	through a burdensome and ineffective bureaucracy,
	a phrase that the Government amendment seeks to strike out. In listening to this debate, I have been struck by the fact that most contributors, including our own Front Benchers and the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten)he now speaks on these mattershave made it clear that the situation is burdensome. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman used such phrases several times, yet he has been in his job for only 24 hours. I should like to hear the Minister acknowledge that the police still face an excessive burden.
	I went out on patrol with the Norfolk constabulary a few months ago, and before doing so I visited the new headquarters, which is in my constituency, and the local Wymondham police station. The officers there showed me all the forms that they have to fill out; indeed, they spread them out over a huge conference table, which the forms more or less covered. [Interruption.] I see that the Minister is writing this down, and I can tell her that the forms were supplied not by Norfolk constabulary but from the centre, and that local officers were forced to comply with them.
	If the Minister does not believe that the system is now too burdensome and bureaucratic, perhaps she will take the word of the chief constable of the Norfolk constabulary. His report of 26 August to the Norfolk police authority enumerates the problems that the police have been facing. We are familiar with the problems that many police forces have had to absorb: additional tasks in support of, or compliance with, extra initiatives, legislation and processes, including best value; data collection for performance indicators; efficiency planning; annual reports; performance planning; consultation; activity-based costing; and various legislation, including the Human Rights Act 1998, the working time directive, and legislation on information and security, and on freedom of information. There are also the diversity issues that constabularies now have to contend with, the implementation of the recommendations of the Climbi report, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, equal opportunities provisions, the implementation of the Police Reform Act 2002, and so on. Those, of course, impose extra burdens as well as extra costs, but there is the additional problem of the funding process itself, which imposes still further costs.
	The chief constable of Norfolk expressed in his report to the police authority the constabulary's concern that Government policy
	seems to provide funding more and more by discrete ring-fenced packages rather than through the general formula, often on a bidding basis which is competitive between Forces. This causes a great deal of work on the part of individual Forces, often at short notice and with the prospect that this work may not result in funding being allocated and may therefore be nugatory. Even when bids are successful, a huge bureaucratic process is attached to grant claims, monitoring and reporting expenditure, and auditing, and, typically, the long-term continuation of ring-fenced funding streams is not guaranteed.
	I know that the Minister said recently that she would like to see, where possible, a reduction in the amount of ring-fenced grants, and I urge her to take that commitment seriously. Where such funding is necessary, it should be as clearly defined as possible and requirements should be given to constabularies as early as possible.
	Even if the Government believe that they are doing their best, I would like them to acknowledge that there is still a long way to go in reducing burdens on the police. I quote again from the chief constable's report, which said that police staff were
	being subjected to an increasing burden of form-filling, paperwork and bureaucracy arising from numerous statutory and other initiatives, target-setting and performance monitoring that is significantly diverting resources from front-line policing.
	He was talking about August this year, and continued:
	We accept that the police service must be fully accountable and open to scrutiny but we feel that the balance has tilted too far in one direction.
	I would like the Government to acknowledge that the balance has indeed tilted too far in one direction. Much more radical action is necessary to tilt that balance back in the other direction and I hope that the Minister will confirm that in her response tonight.

James Purnell: I too shall be brief. I want to draw the Minister's attention to neighbourhood policing in my area, and particularly to two issues on which my local council leader and chief superintendent told me that they would appreciate some help.
	In 1997, Tameside had 353 police officers; it now has 432. That contrasts with the reduction in police numbers that took place under the Tories. It is worth saying that their promise of extra police numbers amounts to a cruel deception. The kindest way of describing it is as spin. If they really believe that they can find 1 billion from putting asylum seekers on an island, they have gone into fantasy politics mode. The problems in the asylum system were, of course, caused by Tory cuts in the first place. Solving the problem by magically finding 1 billion is extraordinary. Frankly, I do not believe that they believe it themselves.
	I base my politics not on fantasy, but on talking to my constituents. In the past few weeks, I have done roving surgeries, in Godley, Ridgehill and Newton. My constituents told me that the key issue for them was antisocial behaviour. Time is short, so I shall provide just one example. A woman with a garage and patch of land behind her house has to contend with young people on that land every night who drink, dump condoms, rubbish and bottles, and terrorise the neighbourhood. Local people are terrified of going outside their doors at night. Members throughout the House are worried about precisely that issue, so I greatly welcome the Government's announcement this week.

David Taylor: In common with my hon. Friend, I speak to many communities in my constituency. One of the difficulties of tackling antisocial behaviour is obtaining witnesses to stand up and report what they have to endure to the courts. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should do more to encourage the use of professional witnesses, which would remove some of the pressures and fears of those communities?

James Purnell: That is an interesting suggestion and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will take it up when she replies.
	The burden of community policing must fall at the community level and in Tameside an innovative approach is being adopted that combines the police and local patrollers. With 100 or so people working together, we will reopen the sub-police stations that have been closed, base people in those areas permanently and have them available from 8 am to 10 pm, so that people will once again know their local constable. The constables will know the regular offenders in the area in the same way as they know the people who run the local post office and local teachers. The constables will have a genuine understanding of what is going on in the community, and that is where the real value of community policing lies. Individuals can build up a relationship with the people they serve, and work with local youth workers, schools and sports clubs to provide young people with an alternative and constructive use of their time. The great majority of young people are scapegoated for the misbehaviour of a small minority.
	I hope that the Minister will consider two points. The first is bail. At my roving surgeries, people complained that curfews or restriction orders on offenders are difficult to enforce. A 15-year-old might be bailed on condition that he does not leave his home after 10 pm, but he does. He can be rearrested, bailed under the same condition, and break it again the next day and the day after. A shoplifter banned from the centre of town can go back again and again. I am told by David Crompton, my local chief superintendent, that it is difficult to take specific measures beyond the bail conditions to stop offenders breaking them time and again. Further measures are possible only in specific circumstances, such as interference with a witness or the possibility that the offender will not surrender to the police. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will address that issue.
	The other issue of concern is alcohol. The sale of alcohol to young teenagers fuels much antisocial behaviour. We all know that it goes on, but the problem sometimes is that the only punishment is taking away the licence of the person selling the alcohol, and that is a big punishment. It should be used when licensees gravely abuse the terms of their licence, but I wonder whether intermediate measures could be threatened. For example, many off-licences rely significantly on lottery income. They can lose their lottery machines if they sell tickets to under-age players. Perhaps we could consider withdrawing that facility from those found guilty of selling alcohol to those under age. I also wonder whether anything else could be done to prevent people from selling alcohol to young teenagers. I would be grateful for the Minister's comments on those two issues.

Bob Spink: We need a balanced approach to what is a sensitive and important subject for all our constituents. Neighbourhood policing is essentially about antisocial behaviour, and juveniles are largely responsible. But the kids should not be stigmatised. Kids in this country are generally great and we must allow them to go out and enjoy their childhood, to grow up, to play games and to gather together socially. We must understand that they will occasionally rebel and experiment, especially with alcohol, and we need to seek tolerant and caring ways of dealing with the problem.
	The children need more facilities to distract them from bad behaviour. We owe that to them, and I congratulate Legacy XS in my constituency on the project that it is running. The kids also need a disciplined framework, with clear boundaries and consistent enforcement. They also need to know that tough consequences will ensue if they break the rules. We need much more parental involvement in ensuring that children behave. I know that not all children these days have two parents, and we all appreciate the difficulties of single-parent families, but we need parents to take responsibility in stopping bad behaviour by children. For instance, my Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Act 1997 enabled the police to involve parents in connection with incidents of under-age drinking. It should be more widely used. I contend that greater local control of the police would ensure that such action is taken, as local people would demand it.
	My second point has to do with the police. Like some other hon. Members, I went out on patrol with my police force on a Friday night in the summer. I encountered some good behaviour among youths gathering together, but other youths displayed a great lack of respect towards the police. My respect for front-line officers certainly grew as a result of that experience.
	I believe that the police should not have to deal with so much bureaucracy. They need to have access to new technologies such as palm-top computers. They need more resources, as well as the 40,000 officers that the Conservative party promises. The number of special constables needs to rise, not fall as has been happening lately.
	The law needs to be clearer and more consistent. In their six and a half years in office, the Government have failed abysmally in that respect. Initiative after initiative has been introduced, often by the Prime Minister himself, and then failed. For instance, child curfews were introduced in 1998. They were a total failure. In 1999, antisocial behaviour orders were introduced. They were an almost total failure, and they died because of bureaucracy. In 2000, the Prime Minister suggested cashpoint fines.

Richard Bacon: That was a farce.

Bob Spink: My hon. Friend is right to say that that was a farce. In addition, fixed-penalty fines were introduced, followed by the suggestion in 2001 about night courts, which copied what happens in America. The Government also promised to remove housing benefits from bad tenants. None of that made a lot of difference, so what happened next? In January this year, the Government established the antisocial behaviour unit, which was designed to tackle anti-social behaviour and
	make an immediate and lasting difference to the lives of people who experience anti-social behaviour day after day.
	What has happened? Nothingabsolutely nothing: if anything, things are getting worse on our streets. Yesterday, the Prime Minister launched an action plan called Together: Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour. Do not hold your breath, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	Under-age drinking is a particular problem. It leads kids on the street into bad behaviour and the first use of drugs, and it needs to be tackled. My 1997 Act gave police the power to remove all alcohol from under-age kids on the streets. It was designed to keep kids out of trouble and to save communities from the trouble that they cause. So what did the Prime Minister do in the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001? He removed the very power that I had given police to take alcohol away from kids. Fortunately, that power was given back to the police on 18 Septemberand about time too. We need a consistent approach on this matter, but that is not what this failed Government have delivered.
	What can be done now? We can show the kids more respect, and give them more in the way of facilities. We can give the police more resourcesand the Opposition have promised 40,000 more police officers. We can try to keep police stations open so people have greater access to them. We can cut bureaucracy, introduce new technology, and ensure that the police involve parents in their children's behaviour. We can try to deliver more treatment for drug addiction.
	We must put an end to gimmicky Government initiatives and get down to introducing simple, tough and consistent laws and to enforcing them with rigour. Finally, we must ensure that local police are truly accountable to local people.

Nick Palmer: As we know, there is widespread concern about crime and antisocial behaviour. The thoughtful new Liberal Democrat spokesman asked why that is, given that there has been a steady fall in crime in recent years according to all the seriously accepted statistics. That started in 1995, when mass unemployment began to fall, as it has continued to do under the Labour Government. The Home Secretary put his finger on it when he said that people constantly read in the media about the most horrific crimes and see intensifying antisocial behaviour locally. They extrapolate from the latter to the former. If they see youths being disrespectful to the police and seemingly out of control and read about horrific murders, they think that the two are linked and that there are more horrific murders. Antisocial behaviour is a serious issue in that it engenders fear of more serious crime. That is one reason why we need to take it so seriously.
	Increasingly, people understand the complexity of the issue. As has been said, we have had something of an auction in the number of additional police that we want to put on the beat. People realise that we have more police, but that they have not solved the problem of antisocial behaviour. Gradually, they are perceiving that the issue is complex. We are talking about the number of police, their roleexactly what they do, what they are allowed to do and how they are deployed by chief constablesand the number of support staff.
	In this political auction, we tend to talk about the number of police officers as opposed to the number of civilian staff. There is a danger of undervaluing the role of support staffas happened in the national health servicein enabling existing police officers to get out on to the beat. I accept the point that everyone makes, which is that certain types of paperwork could be avoided. Few people would say that we should not be reacting to many of the initiatives that the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) listed, such as the Climbi inquiry. It is much easier to say that there is too much paperwork than to identify specific papers that do not need to be filled out. In many cases, it may be possible to reduce the paperwork, but we may also need more civilian staff to take that burden off the police. One constituent recently had a lengthy statement taken down in longhand by a police sergeant. That does not make sense. The Conservatives attempted almost to demonise support staff in the health service by saying that 20 per cent. of them ought to be sacked. I hope that we will not do the same with policing, as we may well need more support staff more urgently than we need more police.
	People are also looking at police powers and the willingness to use them, which the Prime Minister raised recently, as well as at the role of the courts and sentencing. I want a simple, practical change to transparent sentencing. The sentence announced should be the 50 per cent. tariff that we know will result in incarceration, rather than the 100 per cent. that could theoretically be applied. That would be a sensible change, and one that people would understand.
	The Conservative party has complained in the past week or so that the media have been concentrating exclusively on the Leader of the Opposition's secretarial arrangements at the expense of examining the Opposition's policies. I have some sympathy with that complaint. The way in which the media work in Britain is dispiriting. I therefore wish to take the remaining five minutes of my speech to consider quickly the concrete policies that the Opposition propose.
	I am second to none in my admiration for the courtesy and honesty of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). We have met in various Committees and it is always a pleasure to debate with him. One of his characteristics is that he does not try to conceal vagueness, as we saw on the issue of the island to which several Members have referred. He had obviously been pressed by his leader to come up with something, so he said that we ought to put all asylum seekers on an island. When he was asked which island, he did not say, as perhaps most of us would have saidI certainly think that I would haveWe have a number of islands in mind, we are weighing things up but it would not be right to disclose it at this time. Instead, with characteristic honesty, he said, I haven't a clue. I admire him for that. We have to accept that that element of his policy is currently shrouded in considerable vagueness.
	We find the same vagueness in the motion, which urges us to have more local policing that is more accountable to local peoplewords that have no discernible meaning, or which, if they have a meaning, it is a meaning to which we can all subscribe. Why not have more local policing and local accountability? It sounds good.
	In the right hon. Gentleman's speech, he tried to fill the gap. He advocated greater decentralisation. On that point, he uncharacteristically allowed himself to stray into vagueness. Decentralisation can be a good thing but it can also be a formula for postcode policing. Nottinghamshire, part of which I represent, offers an example. We have an unusually low detection rate, for reasons that we could debate, but there is no ambition in the county to set up a protectionist barrier against the use of best practice from elsewhere. We would like to achieve in Nottinghamshire the successful detection rates that we see elsewhere, and if that meant a centralist initiative, it would be just fine with most people. There is a danger that if we chop the country into too many little bits, there will be bits where policing works well and bits where it does not. With respect, that policy is half-baked.

Oliver Letwin: The hon. Gentleman is making a serious speech and we accept that an inevitable consequence of a serious-minded localist approach is that there will be differences between places. Some will be better at some things and some will be bad at others. That is why we place our faith in local democracy. It is our impression that when people see that something is being better done somewhere else, they will want to apply pressure through their local democratically elected police authorities for the place where they live to do it better.

Nick Palmer: I accept that the right hon. Gentleman's intentions are good, but that intervention brings us to the dog that did not bark in his speechsheriffs. He did not mention them once. We are all aware of the dangers of elected sheriffs

Oliver Letwin: rose

Nick Palmer: I am sorry that I cannot give way again; I want to conclude, so that the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) can speak.
	The risk in having elected sheriffs is simple, and we should be open about it. The election of mayors has produced many charmingly eccentric people, but in the emotive matter of crime there is a danger that election could produce British National party or extremist sheriffs. With the complete operational independence that the right hon. Gentleman proposes to give chief constables, the likely outcome would be a state of permanent confrontation between populist, tub-thumping sheriffs with no real power, setting wholly unrealistic targets, and chief constables who ignored them and did their own thing. There is a genuine hole at the heart of the right hon. Gentleman's strategy.
	As I want to allow the hon. Member for Upminster to speak, I shall not pursue the matter further. With respect, however, if the right hon. Gentleman wants that Conservative policy to be taken seriously, it requires considerably more detail.

Angela Watkinson: In view of the lateness of the hour, the House will be pleased to learn that I have abandoned my speech, although I am sure that hon. Members would have enjoyed it. Instead, I intend to make three brief points.
	My first point relates to the 40,000 extra police officers proposed in the Conservative policy. Some hon. Members have referred to that as though it were an extravagant or even unnecessary number, but I understand that 8,000 of the 40,000 might be allocated to the Metropolitan police and, as there are 32 London boroughs, Havering is likely to receive about 160 of those 40,000 police officers. With absences through sickness, holidays, courses, and officers being off duty and other abstractions, 150 officers might be left. Shared out over three shifts, 50 officers are not even enough to have two additional officers in each ward, so by no means is the figure over-generous; it is perfectly reasonable, and no more than is necessary in the prevailing circumstances.
	My second point relates to a particular problem in the London borough of Havering. My constituency is one of the three component constituencies of Havering. Romford is one of the others. Romford town centre has the largest concentration of late-night entertainment centres and nightclubs outside the west end of London, which places enormous demands on Havering police. Those demands should be enough to make Havering a special case, but that is consistently ignored in the Metropolitan police resource allocation formula. We live in hope every year, but so far those hopes have been dashed.
	On Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, 10,000 additional people come into Romfordthat is a conservative figure; it has been put as high as 13,000to avail themselves of the delights of those nightclubs. The on-duty police officers quite rightly concentrate the lion's share of their resources on Romford town centre at that time. It is a public order issue, and the divisional commander is right to do that, but the effect is that there is no neighbourhood policing in the rest of the borough.
	I have been out on night duty with Havering police, and they have one car to use to react to radio messages relating to incidents the length and breadth of what is a very large borough. They get there too late every time. The incident is over; the culprits have escaped. The police then hear of another incident at the far end of the borough, and the car chases after that. In effect, the borough is not policed, with the exception of Romford town centre, when those nightclubs are in operation. I add another pleaI make no apology for doing so againfor additional police in Havering because of the special demands placed on it by Romford town centre.
	My third point relates to the criminal justice system, which does not always give the police the support that it should or could. I should like to give just one example of co-operative working between my local council and the local police in dealing with what we all recognise as a neighbours-from-hell situation. I have received a long list of complaints from some residents who live in some flats over a small block of shops. When I visited them, it became obvious in conversation that all the problems emanate from one flat: there was abusive behaviour, drug taking and drug paraphernalia left in the stairwells, drunkenness and loud music night after night. One of the gentlemen who complained was a newsagent in one of the shops below, who had to get up very early in the morning.
	It was council property, and the council looked very carefully at the tenancy and worked with the police, but the council decided that withdrawing the tenancy was the right course of action, as a last resort after it had tried everything else available to it. However, the outcome was that the court listened to the case, which had taken many man-hours of preparation and a lot of council tax payers' money and funding, but the court decided to give those neighbours from hell another chance. So they are back in the flat, and all their previous behaviour is being repeated. That is just one of many cases where the system lets the police down. If we ask the police to provide neighbourhood policing, which is what local residents want, it does not matter how many additional police we haveif the 40,000 were available tomorrow, it would have no effectunless the criminal justice system plays its part and backs them up.

James Paice: This has been a short but important debate, and it has become clear that there is a remarkable degree of consensus about the solution in principle to part of our problems in our neighbourhoodsa substantial increase and improvement in the concept of neighbourhood policing. The only exception to that consensus was the contribution of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), but he is used to being in a minority on many of these issues.
	What is also clear, however, is that neighbourhood policing must involve all local agencies. It is not something that can be achieved by any one police officer, police force, local authority or anybody else. The crime and disorder reduction partnershipsintroduced by this Government, as I am happy to recogniseare a step forward. Like all partnerships, however, they lack the direct accountability that I believe is essential if we are to achieve the step change that we want.
	Let us look for a moment at the difficulties faced by effective neighbourhood policing. First, there is the issue of what I call the reassurance mindset. The hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) touched on it by suggesting, I think, that there was some sort of conflict between the reassurance role of neighbourhood policing and getting on with policing real, major crime. I do not see it that way. Reassurance is the inevitable consequence of people feeling safer in their streets and neighbourhoods and of the reduction of the fear of crime or of being victims of crime. To that extent, neighbourhood policing has a major role, not just in dealing, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) described, with disorder issues such as louts, foul language and the other things about which Members have spoken, but in gaining low-level intelligence.
	It is a fact that three-quarters of all people who receive a custodial sentence receive their first such sentence before they are 24. There are plenty of statistics to demonstrate that virtually every major criminal started life as a minor criminal, doing the sorts of things about which we have all been complaining, so there is a vital role for neighbourhood policing to help to nip the problem in the bud, to use an old phrase. If it can reduce by only a relatively small proportion the number of people who go on to become ever more major criminals, the purpose of neighbourhood policing will have been achieved.
	Neighbourhood policing also faces the problems of abstractions about which we have talked: the frequent changes of personnel as officers move on and are promoted, so that there is no continuity; the problems of bureaucracy, to which I will return; and the problems of the judicial system, a precise example of which has just been described by my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) whereby police officers feel let down by the system of which they are part. We also have abysmal levels of rehabilitation among young people in our young offenders institutions, with the result that many go back to the same locality and continue their previous life.
	There is no simple, single answer. All those problems have to be put right, and in many cases the Home Secretary agrees, certainly on the basis of some of his comments today and especially in relation to issues of reassurance and the judicial process. I am not sure whether he is having any more joy with the new Lord Chancellor than he had with the previous one in getting the changes that he wants in that regard. He recognises the importance of police numbers; otherwise, he would not keep on talking about the numbers that he has already provided. He also talks about the importance of bureaucracy and local accountability. Over a year ago, in May 2002, he said:
	we have deluded ourselves if we believed we could simply deliver from the centre.
	In the Edith Kahn memorial lecture, he floated the idea of direct elections to police authorities. In almost the next sentence, however, he showed why he is part of the problem and not part of the solution: he started talking about more plans, this time at basic command unit level, and more annual reports.
	What is it that people really want? They want a society in which they can go about their daily lives free from the fear of abuse, assault or intimidation and in which their children can play safely, free of the risks from burnt-out cars, used needles, vomit, foul language and all the other things that beset parts of our communities. None of those things can be achieved from a police car or from a council office, let alone from Whitehall or in national plans. The only way such problems can be cleared up is if we have real police officers actively involved and responsible to the community.

Nick Palmer: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

James Paice: I am sorry, but I cannot give way.
	We need someone to provide leadership to the local agencies and partnerships: the council, the housing authority, the Benefits Agency, environmental health and all the others involved. We may even need changes to legislation such as that on data protection. However, I am convinced that that leadership must come from a neighbourhood officer, and that role should be a distinct career path within the police and not a penance to be done and to be fitted in as and when other duties allow. I have seen examples of that happening, but they happen despite the system, not because of it.
	The Home Secretary is deluding himself if he believes that there is not a problem with the burden of paperwork. Of course, he is not responsible for every single form in the country; nobody pretends that he is. However, we still do not have the computerised custody system that we have been promised ever since he has been in office. There are still 25 forms for every arrest. I have seen them, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) referred to them.
	The Home Secretary talks about direct elections to police authorities, and we advocate them. However, who would stand for election to an authority whose role is now so diminished? That is why true accountability through direct elections will work only if it goes hand in hand with an ability to make a difference. That means local control over total budgets and local targets and setting local priorities.
	I turn to some of the issues that the Home Secretary raised about our proposals in what was a travesty of a description and analysis of our policies. We are talking about police authorities directly elected by the population of each of the 43 forces that we have at present. The number is not 180, 8,000 or whatever other figure is bandied about. We are talking about a true locally elected police authority with real powers to control a block budget and to decide how to spend the money. We are talking about enhancing the role of the Association of Chief Police Officers so that information dissemination, best practice and consistency across all forces is achieved through the professional body, not imposed by the Home Office. Those are important changes, and they are the right way forward.
	Over the past few years, there is no doubt that there has been increasing disjunction between the police and the public whom they serve. There is, I am afraid, so much public disillusionment that crimes are reported only if an incident number is necessary for an insurance claim. More and more people think that the police will not come and that, if they do, they will not do anything and that, if they do something, the criminal will get away with a smack on the wrist or even less, as my hon. Friends have described.
	Is it entirely a coincidence that that has happened simultaneously with the ever-increasing centralisation that we have witnessed over the past few years? How can chief officers and commanders respond to local needs when they have to respond to Whitehall? Some brave officers have railed against the trend and have developed strong local forums. Even those local forums are relatively toothless; they have no real means of accountability back to the people whom they serve or for control over the force.
	Did the Home Secretary really mean it when he said to the Police Federation:
	I want the reduction in bureaucracy to be the fuel for freeing people to do the job sensibly?
	If he did, he had better start soon. There must be no more warm words and wishful thinking about reducing the number of forms and no more blaming others for creating the forms. We need an actual reduction.
	In short, if we are to have the neighbourhood policing that the whole House now largely believes is an essential development, we need to give power back to people on the ground. We need to allow police authorities to be directly elected and given the freedom to respond to local needs. After all, that is democracysurely the Home Secretary is not afraid of that.

Hazel Blears: I am delighted to respond to the debate, but before I get into the meat of my speech I welcome the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) to his post. I am delighted that he finds the time to go out in Winchester on a Friday night but surprised that he is shocked that antisocial behaviour occurs on the streets on Friday and Saturday nights because most of us who live in such cities see such behaviour far too regularly. I advise him to get in touch with Manchester City Centre Safe, which has a fantastic programme to make the city centre a safe, vibrant and lively place where people may have a good night out. I also hope that he listened carefully to contributions to the debate about antisocial behaviour. I hope that he will take a fresh look at his party's stance on the Anti-social Behaviour Bill so that it reflects that of the vast majority of people in this country, who want us to take tough enforcement action on antisocial behaviour and the police to be given powers to make a difference.
	We have had a good debate and I shall respond to hon. Members' comments. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) expressed his concerns about antisocial behaviour in his community and gave us worrying examples of what happens. I know that the Merseyside police are absolutely committed to making their neighbourhood policing work. They now have about 90 public access points throughout Merseyside, which is more than ever. They are trying to ensure that the inspectors in localities know the need to attack all the issues on the ground. I entirely accept that good work is going on but that there is much more to do. The points that my hon. Friend raised should be taken seriously by the local police and I hope that the campaign on tackling antisocial behaviour that we launched yesterday will help to address those important issues in Merseyside and throughout the country on behalf of constituents.
	The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) talked about bureaucracy. We have abolished 2,800 forms, although I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that we need to do more. I was worried that he described the need to introduce diversity in the police force and to deal with child protection as bureaucracy. Such measures are central to ensuring that the police reflect important factors in our communities, so I would not class them as bureaucracy.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (James Purnell) made a good speech in which he talked about antisocial behaviour in his community. I hope that he realises that the new powers that will be introduced next year under the Anti-social Behaviour Bill, such as nationwide fixed penalty notices, training and support for the antisocial behaviour academy and the action line, will help tremendously. He mentioned bail. I would ask his police superintendent to examine the possibility of obtaining interim antisocial behaviour orders because 66 were recently made in Leeds. When the powers of an interim order bite, they are an effective way of ensuring that conditions are enforced.
	My hon. Friend also mentioned alcohol. He knows that we are preparing a national alcohol strategy and that we have introduced measures on under-age drinking and the confiscation of alcohol from youngsters drinking on the streets.

Bob Spink: We did that.

Hazel Blears: My hon. Friend's idea about lottery machines is interesting and I shall find out whether we could take it further.
	The hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink), who is very keen to claim credit for his work, talked about the important need for a twin-track approach on antisocial behaviour: support for those who want it and provisions for families and young people twinned with tough enforcement and giving people the knowledge that consequences will follow from their actions. I am delighted that he supports the Government on every single point of our policy in this area and welcome his support.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) made a thoughtful contribution that was typically useful and to the point. He exposed the emptiness of the Opposition's policy, although he was rather kind to call it vague and half-bakedI might have used more robust words.
	The hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) talked about the Conservative party's pledge of 40,000 extra officers. I am sorry to disappoint Conservative Members because the shadow Home Secretary made an admission today in a typically honest and straightforward fashion. He said that the pledge is only for the first four years and that he could not predict whether there would be a second-term Tory Governmentheaven knows whether there will even be a first-term Tory Governmentand, as a result, he could promise only 20,000 extra officers because he had no idea how the other 20,000 would be funded. He then acknowledged that 5,000 of the 20,000 would be appointed by us. So the pledge has gone from 40,000 to 20,000 to 15,000. It is decreasing by the hour, as we speak. I am sorry but the hon. Lady will be disappointed in the policy of her Front-Bench spokesmen.
	Let me address the heart of the motion. Localism has become a bandwagon for the Tories to jump on. The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) prides himself on being a bit of a thinker. I am told that it has taken him two years to develop his ideas on devolution and localism. It is disappointing that after two years of deliberation, he has concluded that there is nothing the Government can do to change the lives of people for the better. His recipe for localism, which is about removing all support from the centreno national standards or national frameworkwould return us to the chaos and anarchy of laissez-faire politics so beloved of the Tories 100 years ago. That political approach left people to fend for themselves. Money and privilege determined a person's success in life. There was no role for Government. Politics could not make a difference. Nothing was done to create opportunities and drive up standards, especially for the poorest.
	The right hon. Gentleman sets a dangerous agenda. Behind his faade of local accountability lies the sad admission that, in his view, Government and politics cannot make a difference. I understand why he, as a member of the Tory party, thinks that things are hopeless, but I cannot accept

James Paice: It says here.

Hazel Blears: I have written every word of this myself and I am enjoying it.
	I cannot accept that abrogating responsibility at the centre by giving up influence to shape and develop a system is a responsible attitude for any political party in a modern democracy. The Tories recently issued two consultation papers, although people might have seen only the one produced at conference. The first mentions 139 forces, with populations ranging from 2,000 on the Isles of Scilly to 1.3 million in Essex. There would be a directly elected mayor, a multi-person single-purpose police authority and a directly elected single sheriff to run this, that and the other. It is gobbledegook. The second documentthe revised system issued two weeks latersays, We don't really want to get into structures, so rather than be distracted by force reorganisation, we have no plans to change the current structure of police forces. That is a complete change in the space of two weeks. That is how well the Conservatives have developed their policy over those two years.
	Our policies for developing community engagement are about involving local people. The Home Secretary's Edith Kahn lecture earlier this year set out an ambitious programme for communities to involve them in shaping and directing our policies from the inside. My pamphlet entitled Communities in Control, available for 6.95 from the Fabian Society, sets out our commitment. I challenge the shadow Home Secretary: instead of simply having elected police authorities at local authority level, what about underpinning communities at neighbourhood level? People are interested in their street, their neighbourhood, the park where their children play, the shopping precinct and the bus and tube stops where they live. His plans focus on police authority areas. They are structural and relate to existing political boundaries. The real challenge is to get into neighbourhoods below the basic command unit level without the 139 forces and the chaos and anarchy proposed by the Tories. That requires

Patrick McLoughlin: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
	Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to

Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:
	The House divided: Ayes 183, Noes 319.

Question accordingly negatived.
	Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments):
	The House divided: Ayes 306, Noes 182.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	Resolved,
	That this House welcomes the Government's investment in policing which has resulted in 136,386 officers by the end of August 2003, an increase of more than 4,000 since December 2002 and the highest level ever; notes that there are now more than 1900 Community Support Officers and record numbers of police staff assisting police officers in their work; further notes the priority given by the Government to reducing bureaucracy to enable officers to concentrate on frontline duties; and welcomes the Government's commitment to further reform to improve accountability and engagement between the police and the communities they serve.

DELEGATED LEGISLATION

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I propose to put together the Questions on the two motions relating to Northern Ireland.
	Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6)(Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),

Northern Ireland

That the draft Partnerships etc. (Removal of Twenty Member Limit) Northern Ireland Order 2003, which was laid before this House on 7th July, be approved.
	That the draft Employment (Northern Ireland) Order 2003, which was laid before this House on 8th September, be approved.[Ms Bridget Prentice.]
	Question agreed to.

RECOVERY PLAN FOR COD AND THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTHERN HAKE STOCK

Motion made,
	That this House takes note of European Union Documents No. 9081/03, draft Council Regulation establishing measures for the recovery of cod stocks, and No. 10980/03, draft Council Regulation establishing measures for the recovery of the Northern hake stock; welcomes the Government's support of the adoption of recovery plans for cod and hake in which effort control and other measures can play a part, and also supports the Government's intention to ensure a close dialogue with the fishing industry in developing these plans.[Ms Bridget Prentice.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think the Ayes have it.

Hon. Members: No.
	Division deferred till Wednesday 22 October, pursuant to Orders [28 June 2001 and 29 October 2002].

DELEGATED LEGISLATION

Ordered,
	That the following Statutory Instruments be referred to Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation: the Commission for Health Improvement (Functions) Regulations 2003 (S.I., 2003, No. 1587), the Strategic Health Authorities (Consultation on Changes) Regulations 2003 (S.I., 2003, No. 1617), the Patients' Forums (Membership and Procedure) Regulations 2003 (S.I., 2003, No. 2123) and the Patients' Forums (Functions) Regulations 2003 (S.I., 2003, No. 2124).[Ms Bridget Prentice.]

DRAFT GAMBLING BILL (JOINT COMMITTEE) (POWER TO TRAVEL OUTSIDE THE UNITED KINGDOM)

Motion made,
	That the Order of the House of 10th July 2003 appointing a Select Committee to join with a Committee of the Lords to consider and report on any Clauses of a draft Gambling Bill presented to both Houses by a Minister of the Crown be amended by leaving out the words 'within the United Kingdom'.[Ms Bridget Prentice.]

Hon. Members: Object.

JOINT COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Ordered,
	That Standing Order No. 152B (Human rights (joint committee)) be amended, in paragraph (5), by leaving out the words 'shall be three, except that for the purposes of taking evidence, the quorum'.[Ms Bridget Prentice.]

SUSSEX POLICE (CHILD ABDUCTION SCHEMES)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.[Ms Bridget Prentice.]

Tim Loughton: I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the important subject of the child rescue alert scheme that was operating in Sussex. The Minister knows of my very close involvement with child rescue alert since the summer of 2002. I initiated two early-day motions in this House on the subject and I have submitted a number of written questions. I have corresponded with the Minister's colleague, the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears), and had conversations with the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins). That followed an undertaking by the Minister's former Home Office colleague, the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn)he is now at the Department for International Developmentwho, in response to my question at Home Office questions of 2 December, wished the scheme well and undertook to monitor carefully its success. He said:
	I should be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and officers from the Sussex force when the pilot period is over so that we can consider how to spread that good idea elsewhere.[Official Report, 2 December 2002; Vol. 395, c. 605.]
	I have been trying for the past five months to get that meeting with Home Office Ministers and to take a delegation, because of problems that have since occurred with the scheme. Numerous calls from my office have met with no result. Despite promises from three Home Office Ministersthe two Members whom I have already mentioned and Baroness Scotlandthe undertaking given by the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central has not been met. Nothing happened until, mysteriously, this afternoon, when a call from the office of the hon. Member for Salford offered a meeting, some six months late. I am delighted about that offer, but it has of course been prompted by this evening's Adjournment debate.
	This debate really should not be necessary. Importantly, a scheme that started with great promise last year, and which was aimed at offering effective solutions to dealing with the problem of child abductions, has been largely sidelined. It has been a victim of Home Office internal politics. The company that developed the major part of that scheme has been peremptorily sacked, its reputation damaged by highly misleading statements from senior Sussex police officers, with no retraction or apology forthcoming.
	It could all have been so different. By now we could have had a nationwide child rescue alert scheme with millions of members of the public signed up to media broadcasts, text messaging and traffic signs, for example, alerting them to missing children, particularly in the crucial early hours after a child has been abducted.
	Let me provide some of the background. It starts with the tragic case of Sarah Payne who, as hon. Members will know, was abducted and murdered some years ago in West Sussex. Many people then struggled to come up with a solution that could provide an effective counter to child abductions in the future. It is estimated that in Sussex alone, there were 32 child abductions last yearfortunately, not all ending in the tragic circumstances of Sarah Payne.
	Experience in the United States was examined. A scheme called Amber Alert operates in 13 different states and has successfully saved the lives of many abducted children by breaking into media broadcasts to give details of suspected abducted children and by flashing up messages on highway signs alerting drivers to keep an eye out. Largely helped by Councillor Mike Mendosa from Adur, who is a radio presenter, that scheme gained considerable publicity in national and local newspapers last summer. Partly as a result, officers in the child protection unit of Sussex police looked into setting up a pilot scheme across Sussex based on Amber Alert in the US.
	Using highway signs as a means of raising alerts is not practical in a county such as Sussex because it requires freeway dot matrix boards, of which there is only one in the whole county. However, all the local media, led by companies such as Meridian Television and Southern FM, were quickly signed up to the scheme so that when an alert was triggered, broadcasts could be broken into in short order to give listeners details of a suspected abduction.
	The criteria used to trigger such an alert were, first, that the child should be under 16 and missing; and, secondly, that a police officer of at least the rank of superintendent felt that the child might suffer serious harm or death. Thirdly, the child must have been kidnapped or be suspected of having been so; and, fourthly, the case must have sufficient descriptive details of the victim or offender to justify launching an alert.
	Phase one of the schemethe media phasewas successfully launched in Brighton on 14 November 2002. It was realised quite quickly, however, that it had its limitations and early in the summer a Sussex company called Community Alerts approached Sussex police after spending more than a year developing a system that could dramatically expand the messaging service to include many hundreds of thousands more people in Sussexand, potentially, nationwideby the use of text messaging and other innovations. A leaflet and poster campaign was launched.
	When an alert was triggered, subscribers to the scheme would receive a text message with information on their mobile phones. The scheme envisaged signing up members of the public, teachers, pubs, employees of West and East Sussex and Brighton and Hove councils, post offices, neighbourhood watch co-ordinators, taxi drivers, British Telecom and other utility company engineers. It envisaged a potential audience in Sussex alone of some 300,000 peoplea powerful tool for dispensing information to deal with child abductions at a crucial stage.
	Further developments were envisaged, including sending out photographs of children to people on the network by mobile phones, receiving such information via e-mail and in-car and in-cab computers, as well as passing on relevant information to delivery lorries and so forth. The scheme also envisaged setting up a hotline with thousands of telephone lines for the public to ring in with information. All messages were to be provided free of charge by Vodafone and the expertise of the company Multimap was also included. It could have satisfied virtually any requirement or concern and had applications for fighting crime well beyond just child abductions. It was also useful for providing information about potential flood warnings, so the Environment Agency was interested. It was crucial that a company independent of the police keep the register of subscribers in order to allay any fears about civil liberty implications, which could deter people from registering in the first place.
	The second phase of child rescue alert was hailed by chief inspector Martin Underhill, then responsible for the scheme, as
	possibly one of the most innovative threads of the scheme
	and absolutely fantastic. Community Alerts was asked to drop its own schemes of development and work exclusively with Sussex police on developing the child rescue alert scheme. Community Alerts agreed to give Sussex police all the credit for setting up the service because it was deemed to be in the public interest. To this day, the company has neither received nor sought a penny from Sussex police or the Home Office, despite spending tens of thousands of pounds developing the project and bringing in big players such as Vodaphone and Multimap.
	Everything went smoothly. The technology was put in place quickly and could rapidly have been extended to all police forces nationwide, though chief constables inquiring about the scheme were told by the Association of Chief Police Officers that the police technology unit was working on its own service, so they were discouraged from signing up.
	The launch of phase two took place on 6 March this year with great gusto and 300,000 leaflets and posters were ready to be distributed to registered members of the scheme. Everyone agreed that it was a brilliant, world-beating idea. All the technology to achieve it was in place, and worked. But it soon became clear that, for some reason, Sussex police were cooling towards the scheme. Literature was not properly distributed. Public service workers, including the police, were not being properly signed up. It later became clear, as confirmed in written answers to me, that the budget for such a big scheme was less than 20,000 and only one full-time person was employed by the police to work on it. Subsequently, only some 6,000 people were initially registered. Most people did not know much about it.
	In April, Community Alerts was suddenly told that its services were no longer required after its contract expired at the beginning of Junenot that the company had been paid anything for that contract. Coincidentally, a few weeks after the contract expired, on 7 July, a six-year-old from Brighton, Summer Haipule, went missing. It was the first time that the criteria were met to trigger the child rescue alert scheme, and it was duly triggered. Media broadcasts were interrupted, but no text messaging service was available because the company had been sacked. Happily, 14 and a half hours later, Summer was found safe and well asleep under a baby's cot in a neighbours' house. The neighbours were oblivious to the missing child, having not heard the television and radio broadcasts, although they did have mobile phones.
	Newspapers reporting on the case said that the text messaging system did not work properly, and that view was expressed by chief superintendent Paul Curtis. Of course it did not work properly: it had been terminated. However, Sussex police desperately called Community Alerts in the middle of the night when the suspected abduction took place, to try to get the system reactivatedunsuccessfully. Sussex police have not apologised or sought to put the record straight.
	Community Alerts is a small company that developed a service, in good faith, with Sussex police. It provided the service free of charge, allowed the police to take the credit for the service, and then saw its reputation tarnished by the people whom it had tried to work with. Community Alerts has lost contracts in other areas of messaging because of the erroneous bad publicity, and Vodafone, which was crucial to the project, has also distanced itself. Sussex police, the Police Information Technology OrganisationPITOand the Home Office have not returned Community Alerts' calls to explain why the company was dropped. Most importantly, the whole child rescue alert scheme has been left in a state of limbo when it should be expanding nationwide.
	In a parliamentary written answer from the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing and Community Safety on 16 September, I was told that the findings of the pilot scheme in Sussex would not be published, but that they have informed the setting up of a national text messaging service by PITO that can be used to alert the public quickly in the event of child abductions. Can the Minister tell me why the results of that pilot scheme will not be published? I fear that the scheme has been nobbled by the Home Office and parts of the police, even though they are miles away from coming up with a viable alternative, leaving a yawning gap in child protection measures. If the scheme is to be taken over by the police exclusively, it will not work because it needs to be at arm's length from police records. A previous PITO-led scheme, called Bullseye flopped for just such reasons. I gather that the current proposed schemes are based on the priority alert scheme that has been run by the Met for some years, and that is aimed at counter-terrorism measures. That scheme charges subscribers to a pager system 15 a month and has just 2,000 subscribers.
	While all this happened, confusion reigned. ACPO has written to chief constables to warn them off entering into any contracts with companies offering messaging alert services, according to a written answer of 16 September. Deputy assistant commissioner Richard Bryan, the ACPO lead on missing persons, has made contact with Community Alerts this week, spurred onit would seemby the prospect of this debate. In a letter from the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing and Community Safety dated 26 June, she said:
	Sussex Police and PITO are committed to starting registration for a new scheme as quickly as possible.
	When? How much longer will the gap continue? Over recent weeks, Community Alerts has spoken to people supposedly involved in formulating a new version of the child rescue alert scheme on a national basis. Most had been blissfully unaware of the solid and pioneering work that Community Alerts had already done with Sussex police, and were very interested to hear about what had been achieved. Will the Minister deal with the obviously unjust treatment of Community Alertsa company funded by Paul Kent for the specific purpose of providing a not-for-profit messaging service in the event of a child being abducted?
	More importantly, I urge the Minister and her Department to get everyone together to implement a system as soon as possible to plug the gap that currently exists nationwidebefore more children go missing, with tragic consequences, in the absence of a scheme that could save them. I encourage her to ensure that a new system is developed, based on the expertise and success achieved by the Sussex police pilot, but which keeps the data registration at arm's length from the police. The system must be free to the public, to maximise the potential number of subscribers.
	Despite the horrible experience that I have described, Community Alerts remains committed to the cause. It owns the intellectual property rights to the service, and it has the knowledge to set it up nationally. It could announce a national system in a few weeks time, on 14 November, the anniversary of the pilot, and that is what the organisation has offered to do. The police and the Home Office could utilise Community Alerts as they would any other media. They could send a message, and let the organisation broadcast it. In that way, the Home Office could work with the biggest companies in Europe to give every police force a child rescue alert service, and start a national campaign to get the public to register their telephones. Surely we all want to achieve that.
	I urge the Minister to cut through the internal politics that appears to have put the kybosh on a very successful scheme. She should get the scheme up and running nationwide as soon as possible, as everyone involved in the pilot envisaged. She should use the expertise that has already been put in place and proven by the Sussex-based organisation Community Alerts. She should publish the results of the pilot, so that we can all see where it went wrong, if that is what happened. The strengths of the scheme could then be taken up and used to everyone's advantage. Surely that would be to the good of all, and especially of the children who every day are abducted. What I have set out is a practical solution that could help to prevent those abductions.

Fiona Mactaggart: I thank the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for raising this very important issue. As he pointed out, he has been an assiduous advocate of the work of Community Alerts, and of the work on the child rescue alert scheme done by Sussex police.
	The hon. Gentleman gave an account of the response to the scheme of my colleagues that was to some degree partial, but I can understand that. I have much sympathy for the frustration that he felt at the difficulty in obtaining a meeting that he pointed out had been promised earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn). However, he did not remind the House that my hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing, and Community Safety asked him in June whether he wanted a meeting. I am glad that that meeting has now been organised, as it is important that the Government should be accountable to hon. Members who pursue a matter with such assiduity. We must provide them with opportunities to raise such matters, and I am glad that such an opportunity has been arranged for the hon. Gentleman.
	We all agree that protecting children is a top priority. It is a very serious challenge for the police and their partner agencies, and they must respond sensitively and effectively. There has been a worrying increase in the number of child abductions of all types, with the 200102 figure of 584 rising to 846 in 200203. That rise concerns the Government greatly.
	I have put in hand some detailed analysis to determine which types of abductions have increased, and why. That information is important when it comes to providing an appropriate response to such cases. For example, we need to identify the proportion of abductions carried out by parents, known family members or friends outside the immediate family circle, and that carried out by strangers. We need to know how many incidents are reported and subsequently resolved when the missing child is located soon after. The hon. Gentleman referred to the case in his area involving a child who was quite safe in a neighbour's house, even though no one knew that was the case. We need to know the real frequency of abductions that lead to more serious and sometimes fatal consequences. I expect to have some initial findings next month. That sort of information will feed into how the Government respond.
	Against that background, the Government were pleased to see the initiative taken by Sussex police earlier this year with the child rescue scheme pilot, which the hon. Gentleman described in detail. It is a good example of innovative policing, even if the experiences of those involved have sometimes been frustrating. He communicated that frustration to the House well.
	The scheme makes creative use of available technology and local partnerships. It has the potential to be a powerful tool in combating child abductions. However, every care has to be taken in judging whether to use it for a particular abduction and at what stage. One of the key aspects in handling child abductions is to act so as to avoid unintended effects. When deciding to trigger an alert, the police must have every confidence in both the underlying technology and the operational procedures that follow from its use.
	That is why the Association of Chief Police Officers has tasked its working group on missing persons to draw together best practice on police handling of child abductions. It is doing so not because it is trying to delay matters, but because the example that the hon. Gentleman cited from Sussex is one of a series of pieces of work that need to be drawn togetherhow to respond, how to marshal resources, how to co-operate with partner agencies and how to communicate, as well as how to use technology such as the child alert system that he described.
	There is a great wealth of experience, for example, in the police national missing persons bureau, based in New Scotland Yard. Sussex has much to offer from its experience of setting up and running the pilot. Indeed, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, ACPO's missing persons working group is meeting Sussex police next week. I do not believe that that meeting is a consequence of this debate. It is part of the work that ACPO is pulling together and in which it is playing the lead, with the Home Office actively assisting, in planning a national scheme to decide the best way forward, with Sussex being a key contributor.
	I undertake to try to ensure that the points of view of the company that has been involved in the scheme, as well as that of Sussex policeif there is a possibility of a gap between the two, as he suggestsare also fed into the work of the ACPO committee. It is important that, in its work to develop a code of best practice, which it has undertaken should be available by April 2004, the best evidence and experience is brought to bear. The aim is to phase in the implementation of the code of best practice, to give all forces the benefit of those with the most experience in this area and those that have learned from new approaches and innovations, such as what happened in Sussex.
	I understand the hon. Gentleman's concern that the pilot report has not been published, but to maintain the greatest frankness about how the system works, Sussex police did not say that they would publish it in the first place. The lessons that can be learned from such a pilot are best learned if the report is used to inform police practice. To do so, it needs to be very frank. I am not sure that his constituents' best interests are protected by publishing the pilot; they will be protected by ensuring that the experience feeds properly into the work that ACPO is taking forward.
	I undertake to ensure that all the points of view of those involved in the pilotnot only the report that might be in the ownership of the Sussex police, but also the company that contributed to it

Tim Loughton: I have not disagreed with anything that the Minister has said. I do not think that there is a problem with the code of conduct. It worked quite clearly. The question mark is about whether we should involve a company that has been a good partner to Sussex police and has technology that no one else has. Does she think that it is a good way to treat a company that has worked in partnership with Sussex police to say, Thanks very much and goodbye? Does she also agree with me and with that company that the best way forward is an arm's-length approach to gathering subscribers to the scheme? As previous experience has shown, if everything is controlled by the police, the scheme will not work.

Fiona Mactaggart: I agree that the question about the arm's-length approach must be addressed, although I do not know the answer. The hon. Gentleman's case has merit but we need a clear examination of the pros and cons of the process, which is why I undertook to ensure that the views and perspective of Community Alerts can be fed into the work of the ACPO missing persons working group, which is taking the process forward. The group will act as a gatekeeper until the code of practice is published and has promised to resource 24/7 contact to any police force that has to respond to a child abduction. All forces will have immediate recourse to best practice to suit the particular situation that they face.
	The child alert initiative requires robust and secure technology, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out. The police need to be able to extend alerts and searches across the area covered by one force to another. The process must be able to deal with such issues so that individuals, businesses and so on can participate as effectively as possible.
	One possible way forward, and the one that is being most closely examined, is to use some of the infrastructure provided by the police message board system, which has been developed by the Police Information Technology Organisation, and is a secure part of the police website. The results of an end-to-end stress test of the new message board will be received shortly.
	The Sussex pilot has shown that engagement with local media and key agencies is enhanced through a child alert facility. After we have learned the lessons from that, further consideration should be given to how best to engage individual members of the public. That may be through the text messaging service on mobile phones. Intensive publicity campaigns might not always recruit the largest number of public subscribers.
	How best to use available technology in response to child abduction will be taken forward in tandem with best practice procedures. Technology and best practice will work together. The ACPO missing persons group will again lead and co-ordinate. Its chair, Richard Brian, is meeting Sussex police early next week and I have undertaken to inform the hon. Gentleman of the views of the pilot process formed by the company involved.
	The Government are concerned to see that every avenue is explored to help make our country a safer place for children. We are pleased to recognise and encourage local enterprise in public services, such as that shown by the Sussex police with their child alert pilot. We also believe that local successes should be available to every police force and child protection agency as soon as practicable. Where technology can be leveraged to achieve that, it is all to the good. To achieve the best with any new system, it must be properly planned to deliver real benefits and the Sussex pilot has shown what can be achieved. The ACPO missing persons group will drive the whole process forward to ensure that best practice is married to appropriate technology and that the experience of forces, through pilots such as the one in Sussex, means that we achieve a safer environment for our most vulnerable citizens.
	I am glad that my colleague has agreed to meet the hon. Gentleman and his police colleagues. I have undertaken to ensure that the point of view of the company involved in the pilot will properly be communicated to ACPO, which is rightly providing the national lead. I hope that those two actions will deliver the end that he seeks.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Adjourned accordingly at six minutes to Eight o'clock.